Efficient Key Management in Lightweight Cryptography: A New Hashing-Based Approach
Haider H. Al-Mahmood, Saad Najim AlSaad · 2024
Lightweight encryption methods are introduced to overcome the challenges of high-power consumption and high memory usage in the traditional cryptography system. The primary goal of the lightweight encryption technique is to make it suitable for use in devices provided with lower power and small memories. The importance of lightweight cryptosystem is its ability to provide suitable security for data encryption without consuming high level of power and without need for big memories. As the devices with lower battery life and supplied low memory become widespread, encryption key management problems start to emerge. This may lead to a high possibility of an attack on the encryption key and break the encryption system. In this context, this paper proposes a novel hashing- based approach for key generation in lightweight cryptography. The approach involves generating significant hash digits from a seed input to the hashing system, and then using hash code slicing to select different characters and numbers that can be used as a seed for the key generating system. The practical results, which demonstrate that a small seed length can effectively generate a large key length, are a testament to the effectiveness of the proposed approach. These results can be used in the encryption process to reduce the initial total bits, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the system.