Light Weight Cryptography for Resource Constrained IoT Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is going to change the way we live dramatically. Devices like alarm clocks, lights and speaker systems can interconnect and exchange information. Billions of devices are expected to be interconnected by the year 2020, thus raising the alarm of a very important issue ‘security’. People have to be sure that their information will stay private and secure, if someone hacked into your medical device (hand watch) he will be able to view all your medical records, and he could be able to use it against you. If one device is hacked your entire network is going to be compromised. Transmitting your information securely between IoT devices using traditional crypto algorithms are not possible because those devices have limited energy supply, limited chip area and limited memory size; because of those constraints a new type of crypto algorithm came into place: the light weight crypto algorithms. As the name implies those algorithms are light and can be used in those devices with low computational power. In this paper, we start by describing some of the heavy ciphers. We also highlight some lightweight ciphers and the attacks known against them.