An Encryption Scheme using Dynamic Keys and Stream Ciphers for Embedded Devices
Chrysoula Oikonomou, C. Kouzinopoulos, Dimosthenis Ioannidis, Dimitrios K. Tzovaras · 2022 11th Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing (MECO) · 2022
Security in embedded devices can be challenging, due to limited available resources, including processing power, memory and energy autonomy. Embedded security solutions should have a low computational complexity and minimum memory requirements, while at the same time these must not reflect in the mechanism's efficiency. This paper describes a lightweight scheme for Data in Transit Encryption (DiTE) using dynamic keys, designed for embedded devices. The scheme is based on the RC4 and ChaCha ciphers and uses communication channel characteristics, and especially the RSSi, to generate the encryption keys. The proposed algorithm provides an enhanced security level, due to the non static encryption keys, in both physical and transport level.