Energy‐efficient and privacy‐preserving approach for Internet of Things nodes using a novel hybrid fuzzy water cycle and evaporation strategy and matrix‐based Rivest–Shamir–Adleman encryption algorithm

Summary The Internet of Things (IoT) connects physical components all around the world via the internet and provides people with easy access. Even though IoT offers speedy operations, saves money, and provides automation and control, it suffers from different complexities such as data breaches, security issues, and load balancing. To overcome these complexities in the IoT environment, we propose a novel strategy to deal with energy consumption issues and offer a privacy‐preserving data transfer strategy. The proposed hybrid fuzzy water cycle and evaporation algorithm increases the lifetime of IoT networks by reducing the amount of energy required by massive IoT nodes and balancing traffic loads. To protect against malicious entries in cloud servers, the digital data block that is transported to be stored in the cloud is encrypted using the matrix‐based RSA encryption technique. The significance of the proposed methodology is proven by simulated results that compare it to state‐of‐the‐art methodologies in terms of security, system cost, resource utilization, and energy consumption. The resource utilization of this proposed methodology is 100% and the security level is 96%.