Efficient Lightweight Cryptography Algorithm in IoT Devices with Real-time Criteria

Abstract

Cryptographic algorithms are used to ensure the communication channel between the transmitter and receiver. However, these algorithms are focused on processing data blocks that consume a lot of computational resources. Therefore, they have some constraints to be used in IoT devices. This work presents a lightweight AES cryptographic algorithm designed for IoT devices with real-time operative system criteria to improve the time response and with threads that can be suspended to leverage RAM resources for another task. As a result, we design an AES algorithm with a cipher key updating process that uses 11k bytes of Flash, 820 bytes of RAM, and a time response of around 14.5 us in real scenarios.