A Partial Hashing-Based Algorithm for Data Integrity Verification in IoT Devices

With the development of the Internet of Things, modern societies increasingly rely on the internet and its infrastructures. Concurrently, cyberattacks such as man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, which intercept, modify, or compromise data, pose significant security threats. With the growing utilization of IoT devices in average households, an increasing amount of personal and even sensitive data are being transferred between end-users and cloud servers. Owing to the complexity of these attacks, which are often executed with precision and on a large scale, a robust data integrity verification system is essential. Additionally, because data can be compromised without end-users noticing, ensuring the integrity and reliability of data transferred between cloud servers and IoT devices is critical. In this study, we propose a method based on partial hashing. The input data are sliced into random parts, and a random hashing algorithm is applied to each slice. Finally, the hashes of the data slices are concatenated, and a final hash is calculated. The hashing method is dynamic, volatile, and shared between the end-user and the server each time, ensuring the robustness of the proposed method.