Light Weight Crypto Solutions for Cyber Physical Systems and Mobile Cloud Computing Environment

In the last few years, there are rapid advances and adoption of many technologies in our life such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Wireless sensors, and many others. This adoption and integration brings up very important issues to be considered including data storage and analysis. Adding to that, securing all these huge amounts of transmitted data is a very important issue. It is believed that Symmetric key and Asymmetric key encryption algorithms are used to provide high level of security to protect data. But most of these technologies involve using constrained devices in area and processing capabilities.

Here comes the trade-off between security and performance. Using Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) might help in solving this issue driven by the need for security algorithms that can be executed on resource-constrained devices such as wireless sensor networks, RFID tags, smart grid, and cyber-physical systems. Lightweight crypto aims to provide high level of security using lowest computing power possible. There are many proposed lightweight stream-ciphers, block-ciphers, and hash functions, but still there is no standardization of lightweight so far.

In our research, we study existing Software and Hardware implementations of current lightweight crypto algorithms. Also, we are focusing on how to use the lightweight cryptography efficiently in constrained environment, mainly in Cyber Physical Systems and Mobile Cloud Computing to provide high levels of security.