Encryption based on cellular automata for wireless devices in IoT environment

Abstract

A large number of physical objects are interconnected and accessed through the internet along with the existing technology like cloud computing, mobile computing, wireless sensor networks and big data forms a big paradigm called the Internet of Things (IoT). Data from remote and neglected areas are collected via wireless sensors and stored in the cloud. Growth in the number of the sensing device and the server to which these are connected leads to many security issues and malicious attacks. With mirai botnet and jeep hack about 150 million user’s information from MyFitnessPal nutrition app was stolen. This paper mainly focuses on security challenges for transmitting the data in the wireless sensor network in the IoT environment. To avoid the malicious attack, eavesdropping, algebraic attacks and other attacks a new security algorithm is proposed based on Cellular Automata (CA) which has a key length of 80 bits and the text size is 64 bits. Reversible rules of CA are used in this algorithm to achieve reversibility, parallelism, stability, randomness, and uniformity. The process of encryption and decryption is performed for 15 rounds to avoid dependency between the ciphertext and the plain text. Finally, we compare the execution time, throughput and the avalanche effect of the proposed algorithm with the existing algorithm like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Height, Present algorithm. The proposed algorithm is verified to be a better choice for lost cost and resource-restricted devices.