Design and Preliminary Performance Evaluation of a SIMON–LWE Hybrid Encryption Scheme for Cloud-Based IoT

Cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks have transformed data collection, processing and communication across a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, smart cities, transportation, and environmental monitoring. But, most of the resource constrained IoT devices have limited battery power, memory, storage and processing power, which make it hard to implement conventional cryptographic algorithms such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Rivest–Shaumir–Adleman (RSA), and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in them. Moreover, standard cryptographic systems are vulnerable to quantum computing attacks. In this work, we propose a resource-efficient encryption framework called SIMON-LBA, combining the SIMON block cipher with a key-generation scheme based on LWE lattice cryptography to achieve quantum resistance and compromise minimal resources. Numerical experimentation with the model was carried out in a simulated cloud-IoT environment using Python in a quantitative experimental approach. Over 100 iterations, the representative sensor data was assessed, such as PM2.5, temperature, and humidity data. Encryption and decryption times, throughput, energy usage, CPU usage and memory usage were measured and compared with a 100 iterations for each of the following algorithms: AES, RSA, ECC, DES, ChaCha20, SIMON, SPECK, Attribute-Based Signcryption (ABSC) and Homomorphic Encryption. The results indicated that the time for encryption is 0.644 ms, the time for decryption is 0.589 ms, the throughput is 1,038.40 kbps, the CPU utilization is about 0.12%, the memory consumption is 0.48 MB and the energy consumption per operation is 0.009974 J. The SIMON-LBA shows a promising computational efficiency-potential postquantum security tradeoff.