A Lightweight Encryption Scheme for IoT Devices in the Fog

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the collection of everyday smart devices which connect to the Cloud, often through Fog nodes, to transmit and receive information. These everyday devices are distinct from traditional computers because they typically have notable constraints on their RAM, flash memory, and computational power. Due to these constraints, we believe that many of the proposed encryption schemes are too heavyweight to be employed in the IoT. In this paper we present a lightweight, flexible encryption scheme that relies on the one-way information loss property of a secure hash function. Our scheme imposes minimal computational and storage requirements, and imposes no non-negligible burdens on the encrypting device, except for the hash itself. We find that the encryption algorithm is particularly lightweight, and holds up strongly in terms of its speed and memory efficiency.