OPTIMIZING ENERGY-EFFICIENT ENCRYPTION IN IOT: EXPLORATION OF STREAM AND LIGHTWEIGHT BLOCK CIPHERS

The massive proliferation of the IoT devices has posed intricate problems in the protection of data delivery within limited computational resource. Such environments are usually very demanding to conventional encryption protocols. The paper fills an urgent knowledge gap because it critically compares lightweight block ciphers and stream ciphers to provide an energy-efficient encryption in the IoT-networks. Although the available studies tend to consider performance or security as a key aspect, our study is unique in that it combines the aspects of the throughput, latency and energy consumption of a system to give a multi-dimensional assessment. We can characterize the actual tradeoffs and applicability of the three modes, CTR, OFB, and CFB by deploying them over a real-time testbed. Findings reveal CTR mode offers high efficiency and performance trade off. The study offers practical information on cipher selection which is part of the future development of lightweight encryption approaches with an (energy-constrained environment) focus.