A survey on lightweight authenticated encryption and challenges for securing industrial IoT

Abstract

Embedded systems are widely deployed nowadays in various domains like smart cards, automobiles, telecommunications, home automation systems, computer networking, digital consumer electronics, defense and aerospace. IoT is the technology enabling the inter-connection of these embedded devices (composed of sensors, actuators etc.) through the internet to exchange data, optimize processes, monitor devices in order to generate benefits for the industry, the economy, and the end user. These operations typically consists of sensitive or critical information that needs to be protected against outside world. Therefore their security comes as a primary concern. However the main challenges while providing security for these devices are resource constrained environment in terms of computing power, memory capacity, chip area and the power usage. The limited capabilities of these devices necessitate the adoption of Lightweight Cryptography (LWC). Lightweight cryptography is a field dealing with cryptographic algorithms or cryptographic protocols specially designed for the usage in constrained environments which includes RFID tags, contactless smart cards, sensors, embedded systems, health-care devices and so on. This work provides a survey of existing lightweight authenticated encryption algorithms. We surveyed 17 lightweight AE schemes (LWAE), out of which 9 schemes are from the ongoing CAESAR competition.