A hybrid chaos-based cryptographic framework for lightweight IoT security: enhancing efficiency and security in low-power devices

The growth of resource-constrained embedded and mobile IoT devices has increased the need to find a security-related solution that meets the demand for good security as well as computational efficiency. While conventional schemes, AES and RSA, have good security properties, they are inefficient in devices that operate under these constraints due to their computational and memory limitations. This paper proposes a new framework for lightweight cryptography that combines chaotic key generation for high entropy with hybrid symmetric operations. The chaotic sensitivity and unpredictability of the logistic map allow our system to produce high-entropy keys in-memory using small seeds, and secure keys are provided through index permutation for confusion and diffusion. Furthermore, a hybrid system, with two models of XOR and modular arithmetic, is used to introduce nonlinear transformations with minimal additional overhead. A security analysis suggests the proposed system is resilient against brute-force or statistical attacks by the combined space complexity of a very large dynamic keyspace and the chaotic sensitivity of the mapping function. In practice, the experiment results support the analysis and align with NIST SP 800 − 22 randomness tests while achieving encryption within 412 ms for 10 MB of file data and outperforming AES-128 by 34% and reducing memory usage as well. Given the straightforward nature, adaptability, efficiency, and fit to IoT, sensor networks, and real-time mobile software applications, the proposed framework represents a means to reconcile IoT between theoretical security robustness, in order to deploy lightweight cryptography for use in pervasive computing environments.