A new lightweight mechanism for IoT devices protection

Employing IoT devices presents numerous obstacles, one of which is security as a critical concern in data transfer; hence, the development of adequate security methods for such devices must take into account their limited power, memory, and processor capacities. Consequently, IoT devices require lightweight encryption. This study introduces a lightweight security approach for Internet of Things devices. We created the Speck-Ultra (Speck-U) algorithm, which is a novel and incredibly lightweight encryption system based on the Speck algorithm. Speck-U is based on ECC for the creation of a private key and ECDH for key exchange. A hashing function (HMAC-SHA3) was used to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted data. The proposal has been utilized in healthcare for testing and validation reasons. The location where the healthcare system was installed depends on the sensors and controllers used to transmit and receive data over the internet. In addition, smartphone and website applications were implemented. Experiments and comparisons demonstrate that Speck-U is more dependable in terms of privacy, security, and integrity than the original Speck. In addition, its encryption, hashing code calculation, and decryption implementation times are superior. The security results were examined and tested using a NIST test suite, with 15 key generation and ciphertext tests passing with flying colors.