A Secure and Efficient ECC-Based Scheme for Edge Computing and Internet of Things

Abstract

Recent growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised security concerns over the confidentiality of data exchanged between IoT devices and the edge. Many IoT systems adopt asymmetric cryptography to secure their data and communications. A drawback of asymmetric cryptography is the sizeable computation and space requirements. However, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in constrained environments for asymmetric cryptography due its superiority in generating a powerful encryption mechanism with small key sizes. ECC increases device performance and lowers power consumption, meaning it is suitable for diverse applications ranging from the IoT to wireless sensor network (WSN) devices. To ensure the confidentiality and security of data and communications, it is necessary to implement ECC robustly. A special area of focus in this regard is the mapping phase. This study’s objective was to propose a tested and trusted scheme that offers authenticated encryption (AE) via enhancing the mapping phase of a plain text to an elliptic curve to resist several encryption attacks such as Chosen Plaintext Attack (CPA) and Chosen Ciphertext Attack (CCA). The proposed scheme also undertakes evaluation and analysis related to security requirements for specific encryption attributes. Finally, results from a comparison of the proposed scheme and other schemes are presented, evaluating each one’s security characteristics and performance measurements. Our scheme is efficient in a way that makes so suitable to the IoT, and in particular to the Industrial IoT and the new Urbanization where the demands for services are huge.