Recent Lightweight cryptography (LWC) based security advances for resource-constrained IoT networks

Abstract

In today's world, the Internet of Things (IoT) plays a major role to interconnect all the devices and improve the overall Quality of Life (QoL) for people. The main concern among IoT systems revolve around three pillars namely security, confidentiality, and privacy owing to the sensitive nature of the data being transmitted and processed byIoT devices. Traditional cryptographic approaches address these concerns by ensuring the authenticity and confidentiality of IoT systems. However, the majority of IoT devices are resource-constrained, which implies that they operate under significant resource constraints such as limited computational power, constrained battery life, physical compactness, and restricted memory capacity. To this end, Lightweight cryptography (LWC) offers methods specifically designed to accommodate the limitations of resource-constrained IoT devices. This work establishes the role of light weight cryptography for such resource constrained IoT networks in terms of security perspectives. In this work, we explore the security vulnerabilities of IoT systems and the associated lightweight cryptographic methods highlighting four components namely lightweight block ciphers, lightweight stream ciphers, hash functions, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The work further discusses the role of LWC and reviews the recent advancements in different sectors of IoT such as smart city, industries, healthcare, smart grids, and agriculture. Finally, several open research directions are highlighted in order to guide future LWC and IoT researchers.