A Review on Key Management and Lightweight Cryptography for IoT

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is a technology that allows devices that can be completely different to connect via internet for data exchange. The example of such devices can be a toy which is used by a child, a stereo system in your car or a kitchen appliance. It wasn't a distinct idea even by the end of the previous century, but in the last twenty years in has become a part and parcel of our lives. The core reason for this is super paced adaptability by the consumers. The unfortunate aspect for sharing this bulk amount of data between different IoT devices is that hackers and the unethical users gets interested in such data and these devices becomes a target for such people who dwell into vulnerabilities to acquire the data. Moreover, if this data goes in the hands of hackers or unethical users, it can easily compromise the entire organization which is the owner of that data. In this paper we initially investigate the security requirements for IoT (Internet of Things), those security requirements are classified in terms of layers of the TCP/IP model. After the in-depth analysis and critical evaluation of the security requirements, we look into the key management perspective of systems and IoT in particular. In last we discuss lightweight cryptography which is particular used for IoT. We perform in depth analysis of all the possible algorithms that are used in IoT with lightweight cryptography. Complete comparisons with strengths and weakness of all the lightweight algorithms are also carried out in our research work. The major security concerns in IoT configurations are also authentication and confidentiality. Therefore, we conclude that for client to client communication secret key cryptography should be used and where clients need to communicate with the server in IoT configuration, Elliptic Curve Cryptography based on lightweight algorithms can be used for authentication and secret key mechanism can be followed for confidentiality.