Lightweight Secure Technology Future of Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term which treats all objects around us as a whole, interconnected network. The ‘thing’ in IoT can be a person with a pulse monitor or smart meter to calculate electricity. These ‘things’ must have a unique IP address and able to communicate with other objects over internet without manual intervention. Though these new technologies are overwhelming, they also expose severe IoT security challenges. IoT applications suffer from different types attacks such as eavesdropping attack, spoofing and false data injection attack, man-in-the-middle attack, replay attack, denial of Service attack, jamming attack, flooding attacks etc. During the last decade, many cases of attacking IoT devices were identified. It is a direct threat to our privacy, our conversations everything that sums up our life. While the world today, is moving towards a more secure system, we must be aware of the security lacks and should provide a strong mechanism to defend ourselves against the same. Because IoT is an amalgamation of both Hardware and Software, the issues posed by IoT are also double fold. As hardware concern, objects are lightweight in terms of memory, energy, computing power etc. and as a software concern current security algorithms are designed for high end systems so will not suffice in IoT environment. This leads to the need for lightweight security mechanisms in IoT network. Currently protocols like PRESENT, Clefia, TEA etc. are designed for lightweight encryption but still suffers from Differential Attack, Related key attack etc. Lightweight integrity is also achieved with SHA2, SHA 3, Light-Weight One-way Cryptographic Hash Algorithm(LOCHA), Timestamp Defined Hash Algorithm (TDHA). So there is a need for a whole concrete lightweight system which will remove the shortcomings in the current lightweight encryption and integrity protocols and provides better security.