Lightweight Cryptography in Embedded IOT Systems

Tawfik, Kamal Bassiouny Kamal (2024) Lightweight Cryptography in Embedded IOT Systems. Masters thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.

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Abstract

Internet of things (IOT) is a hot topic, and applications are increasing every day, IOT has been involved now in sport, healthcare, automotive, smart homes and etc. it depends on creating a wide range of network that contains nodes(things) that are connected together to gateway and share data through internet. That nodes or things can by monitored, controlled, send and receive data through internet from anywhere. And with that huge increase of IOT application, securing that date became a challenge for the security researchers, on how to achieve the security of the data with complying with IOT limitation in terms of resources such as power consumption, processing speed, memory and etc. the researcher are trying to find the most optimized cryptographic method that enable developer to encrypt data in IOT restrict environments with a good balance of security and resources consumption.

Research has been studying different types and algorithms, and Market already has used some algorithm, maybe optimizing exist general one to IOT environment such AES and other tried to develop special designed algorithm for IOT environment such as PRESENT, SIMON, ChaCha, SIMON, KTANTAN etc. each method tries to meet the IOT constraints and achieve the security and go towards perfect secrecy.

In this research project I will try to do a comparison between most common used Light weight cryptography methods to find out the best recommendation and practices to reduce the overhead execution time, memory consumption and cost when using with Embedded system. The paper states advantage and drawbacks of each method in the study. That would help decision maker and engineers to choose the best method and apply the finding so that they can have a secure system with lower resource consumption. In this paper I looked into three different methods which are the most used based on research Papers in previous work and standards, AES, PRESENT, and ChaCha.

The methodology of the comparison is based on two resources of data First, the Literal review of previous research papers, and the data collected on real code execution
on ESP32 MCU which is very popular MCU used in IOT applications.

The result shows that there is a trade-off between security and resource usage. Overall, you can chive more security, but you would need high computing power to overcome processing overhead for example AES algorithms. You can still achieve some good balance if you use SIMON algorithms, but you need to consider its limitation implementation of plain text size

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Supervisors:	Name Email Spelman, Ross UNSPECIFIED
Uncontrolled Keywords:	IOT; lightweight Cryptography; Microcontroller; Software; Hardware
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > Electronic computers. Computer science T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Electronic computers. Computer science Q Science > QA Mathematics > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > T Technology (General) > Information Technology > Computer software > Computer Security T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering > Telecommunications > Computer networks > Internet of things
Divisions:	School of Computing > Master of Science in Cyber Security
Depositing User:	Ciara O'Brien
Date Deposited:	28 Jul 2025 14:27
Last Modified:	28 Jul 2025 14:27
URI:	https://norma.ncirl.ie/id/eprint/8269

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