LSA: A LIGHTWEIGHT SYMMETRIC ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM FOR RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED IOT SYSTEMS

Abstract

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) systems are being employed in a wide variety of domains, such as education, healthcare, industrial equipment automation, etc. With gigabytes of data being generated and processed by even the average IoT system, securing this generated data is crucial task. It requires a low-cost, high-performance encryption system for constrained IoT systems. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is widely used for many cryptographic domains because of its strong security characteristics. AES is designed for general-purpose symmetric encryption algorithm but there is a need for a lighter algorithm that is specifically tuned for the needs of IoT devices with limited computation capabilities. Aim: This paper is proposing Lightweight Symmetric Algorithm (LSA) as a faster and lighter alternative to the standard AES-128 for IoT applications. The primary objective of its design was to minimize the time and memory usage required for encryption and decryption processes while retaining the strong security characteristics. Method: The research also demonstrates the comparative analysis of LSA and AES based on efficiency and resource usage. It also proves the difficulty of performing a successful brute force attack, confusion and diffusion properties, and avalanche criterion satisfiability are identical for AES and LSA algorithms. Findings: The comparison analysis of LSA and AES suggests a 14.68% lower memory usage for encryption and decryption as well as more than a 50% decrease, on average, in the required time for encryption or decryption of differently-sized files consisting of the same 128 bit data blocks. The comparisons and empirical observations show that AES and LSA are both almost identical in terms of their security characteristics such as the difficulty of performing a successful brute force attack, confusion and diffusion properties, and avalanche criterion satisfiability. Conclusion: The proposed LSA algorithm is compared with various available lightweight cipher technologies with respect to time, memory, and security properties suggests the suitability of LSA for resource constrained IoT devices with strong security requirements.