Efficiency and Security Evaluation of Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

The IoT has become an integral part of the technological ecosystem that we all depend on. The increase in the number of IoT devices has also brought with it security concerns. Lightweight cryptography (LWC) has evolved to be a promising solution to improve the privacy and confidentiality aspect of IoT devices. The challenge is to choose the right algorithm from a plethora of choices. This work aims to compare three different LWC algorithms: AES-128, SPECK, and ASCON. The comparison is made by measuring various criteria such as execution time, memory utilization, latency, throughput, and security robustness of the algorithms in IoT boards with constrained computational capabilities and power. These metrics are crucial to determine the suitability and help in making informed decisions on choosing the right cryptographic algorithms to strike a balance between security and performance. Through the evaluation it is observed that SPECK exhibits better performance in resource-constrained IoT devices.