Lightweight Public Key Cryptography for Authentication in IoT Environments

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has elevated the demand for secure, efficient, and scalable authentication mechanisms tailored for resource-constrained environments. Traditional public key cryptographic approaches are ill-suited for embedded platforms due to their high computational and energy overhead. This chapter investigates the integration of lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) into IoT authentication protocols, emphasizing software and hardware-level optimizations, platform-specific implementations, and protocol-level adaptations. A comparative analysis of ECC performance across embedded operating systems such as Contiki-NG and RIOT-OS reveals the importance of instruction-level tuning, memory hierarchy exploitation, and compiler-aware techniques. The role of cryptocoprocessors in reducing latency was critically examined, alongside the trade-offs between hardware acceleration and software portability, the implementation of ECC in lightweight protocols such as CoAP, DTLS, and 6LoWPAN was explored to demonstrate practical applicability in real-world IoT scenarios. By addressing key limitations in energy consumption, latency, and security resilience, this chapter establishes ECC as a viable foundation for nextgeneration lightweight authentication in embedded IoT systems.