Lightweight and Homomorphic Security Protocols for IoT

Abstract

The rise in usage of IoT devices for data collection in various fields has been astronomical in recent times. There has been an increased requirement to process the collected data on various cloud providers as IoT devices are compute-constrained. However, online data processing presents a substantial security challenge, especially in sensitive data, such as finance and medicine. The motivation behind this chapter comes from the observation that the encryption algorithms used for IoT devices need to be lightweight because IoT devices are not capable of heavy computation and the algorithm must be homomorphic. This is important because when the encrypted data moves from the device’s private environment to the public network, the data integrity is a major factor for such sensors and measurement devices. In this way, the data never needs to be in its decrypted form outside the organization’s ecosystem. This chapter aims to first present the limitations of IoT devices in the context of IoT networks. Then, the chapter analyses some of the most popular security protocols for IoT networks and subsequently understands the need for lightweight and homomorphic encryption. Then, the chapter presents and compares the most widely used lightweight and homomorphic algorithms/schemes, finally presenting the observations and conclusions based on the study. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.