Secure Lightweight Authentication and Intrusion Detection Framework for IoT-Enabled Embedded Devices

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has resulted in the deployment of large numbers of resource-constrained embedded devices that continuously exchange sensitive information over wireless networks. Conventional cryptographic mechanisms can provide strong security but may introduce considerable computational, memory, and energy overhead on low-power embedded platforms. This paper presents a secure and resource-efficient embedded system architecture for IoT communication using lightweight cryptographic techniques. The proposed system integrates an embedded IoT controller, sensor interface, lightweight authenticated encryption, secure key management, wireless communication, and remote monitoring. The architecture employs a lightweight cryptographic layer to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity while minimizing processing and communication overhead. The proposed implementation considers ASCON-AEAD128 as the primary cryptographic mechanism because of its suitability for constrained devices and its standardization for lightweight cryptography. Lightweight alternatives including PRESENT and SPECK are also considered for comparative evaluation. The embedded system performs data acquisition, preprocessing, encryption, authentication, packet transmission, and secure data verification locally. Energy-aware operation is achieved through duty cycling, selective communication, and low-power processor modes. Performance is evaluated using encryption latency, decryption latency, memory utilization, throughput, energy consumption, communication overhead, and CPU utilization. The proposed architecture provides a practical framework for secure IoT communication where security, computational efficiency, memory usage, and energy consumption must be jointly considered.