Analysis of Lightweight Encryption Scheme for Fog-to-Things Communication

Abstract

The growing concerns in cybersecurity is preventing unknowns which evolve from time to time. Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the emerging fields that have been applied for smart cities and industries. The promises of IoTs could be confronted with the growth in the number and sophistication of cyberattacks. The extension of digital world into physical environment adds new attack surfaces on the existing security threats of traditional Internet. The major challenge brought about by physical connectivity of IoTs is to implement distributed security mechanisms for resource constrain of IoT devices. As an emerging architecture supporting IoT applications, fog computing can be considered to solve the resource and distribution issues in securing fog-to-things communication. Security functions and services, such as cryptography, could be offloaded to fog nodes to reduce computational and storage burdens on IoT devices. The distribution of fog nodes can also solve the scalability of cloud by reducing central processing and communications. On the other hand, lightweight cryptographic functions, such as elliptic curve cryptography, have been proved to be suitable for embedded systems. In this paper, we have analyzed security challenges in terms of cybersecurity principles and proposed a novel encryption scheme for fog-to-things communication.