A Lightweight Hybrid Framework for Secure Communication in Low-Resource IoT Devices

Abstract

The spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has brought about imposing security issues especially because of their nature of limited processing capacity, memory, and power. Most traditional cryptographic algorithms are usually resource-consuming such that they render them susceptible to attacks. The present paper suggests a new lightweight hybrid cryptography system that can serve resource-restrained IoT devices in particular. This framework is cooperatively built on certificate-based authentication based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as a secure method of establishing keys with the symmetric speed and low overhead of a data encryption scheme, the ChaCha20-Poly1305 Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) scheme. The full architecture design showed with a higher level of security measures and simulate it on a representative model of an IoT hardware (ARM Cortex-M4). An overall comparative analysis with standard algorithms (RSA, AES) and other lightweight schemes show that the proposed framework shortens the execution time by up to 82% and reduces energy consumption by more than 60% and offers strong security to all types of common IoT attacks such as a man-in-the-middle, replay, and timing attacks. In the framework, there is also a reduction of 34 percent in RAM and 47 percent in Flash memory consumption as compared to conventional methods.