A Lightweight Encryption Scheme for IoT Devices in the Fog

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises of a heterogeneous mix of smart devices which vary widely in their size, usage, energy capacity, computational power etc. IoT devices are typically connected to the Cloud via Fog nodes for fast processing and response times. In a rush to deploy devices quickly into the real-world and to maximize market share, the issue of security is often considered as an afterthought by the manufacturers of such devices. Some well-known security concerns of IoT are - data confidentiality, authentication of devices, location privacy, device integrity etc. We believe that the majority of security schemes proposed to date are too heavyweight for them to be of any practical value for the IoT. In this paper we propose a lightweight encryption scheme loosely based on the classic one-time pad, and make use of hash functions for the generation and management of keys. Our scheme imposes minimal computational and storage requirements on the network nodes, which makes it a viable candidate for the encryption of data transmitted by IoT devices in the Fog.