Foundations of Lightweight Cryptography for Resource Constrained IoT Devices
Venkata Lakshmi Narayana Gorle, D. Padmapriya · 2025
The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments in resource-constrained environments has necessitated the development of secure and efficient cryptographic mechanisms tailored for limited computational, memory, and energy capacities. This book chapter provides a comprehensive exploration into the foundations of lightweight cryptography with a focus on its applicability to constrained IoT devices. It examines the design and evaluation of lightweight block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD), and public key cryptographic algorithms, emphasizing their resilience against advanced cryptanalytic techniques including differential, linear, and algebraic attacks. Implementation challenges such as key size, energy footprint, computation time, and resistance to side-channel and replay attacks are critically analyzed to highlight the trade-offs between performance and security. The chapter addresses current research gaps, emerging standards, and future directions in the domain of low-power cryptographic systems, aiming to guide both theoretical advancements and practical implementations.