A New Text Encryption Scheme Suitable for Combating Sniffing Attacks in IoT Applications via Non-supersingular Elliptic Curves over Binary Extension Fields

Abstract

Several research works propose the use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to provide security for the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing due to its shorter key requirement of approximately 160-571 bits vs. 1,024-15,360 bits of the others whilst achieving the same level of security. As a result, several ECC based text encryption schemes have been proposed in recent times. However, due to the mathematical foundations behind some of these schemes, there is the need for improvement to make them efficiently suitable for applications targeting IoT platforms. In addition, many of the existing schemes are either limited to some languages and/or use lookup tables which increase their computational overheads in terms of storage and processing. Against this background that this paper proposes a new ECC based text encryption scheme using efficient elliptic curve arithmetic to reduce the computational overheads. The scheme resists the major forms of sniffing attack in software implementation of ECC-based schemes. A test implementation proves that a very high key sensitivity is also achieved.