A lightweight efficient chaos‐based cryptosystem for constrained‐node networks

SummaryInterconnected sensor and actuator objects creating Constrained‐Node Networks (CNN) are among the most prominent technologies of the Internet of things. Deployed to monitor our lives, surroundings, and critical infrastructure, CNN communications must be strongly secured in order to prevent devastating unauthorized access to critical information. This, however, faces severe challenges imposed by CNN constraints in terms of energy, memory, and computational power. To address such conflicting requirements, this paper presents a chaos‐based efficient lightweight secure communication system for CNNs. The proposed cryptosystem performs optimized confusion‐diffusion operations at the byte level allowing it to be fully implemented on an 8‐bit microcontroller. Obtained results from extensive experiments at both statistical and implementation levels confirm the robustness of the proposed cryptosystem against a multitude of attacks. Additionally, the evaluated encryption/decryption speeds along with the low memory and energy consumption grant the proposed cryptosystem attractive lightweight aspects enabling its deployment in very constrained CNN applications having soft real‐time requirements.