DNA-PRESENT: An Improved Security and Low-Latency, Lightweight Cryptographic Solution for IoT

Area of Science:

• Cryptography and Network Security
• Internet of Things (IoT) Security
• Lightweight Cryptography

Background:

• The Internet of Things (IoT) faces significant security threats due to massive data exchange and resource-constrained devices.
• Lightweight cryptographic algorithms are crucial for enhancing IoT data security without compromising performance.
• The PRESENT block cipher, while efficient, suffers from slow confusion and diffusion due to static bits in its permutation layer.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the slow confusion and diffusion properties of the PRESENT block cipher.
• To enhance the security of lightweight cryptography for IoT environments.
• To develop a novel block cipher, DNA-PRESENT, by integrating Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) replication and shift-aided operations.

Main Methods:

• Modification of the PRESENT block cipher using Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) replication principles and shift-aided operations.
• Implementation of the proposed DNA-PRESENT block cipher.
• Comprehensive security, cost, and performance analyses to evaluate improvements.

Main Results:

• DNA-PRESENT achieved a 73.57% increase in key sensitivity and a 33% increase in plaintext sensitivity.
• The algorithm maintained an average bit error rate (BER) of 50.2%.
• Throughput increased by 176.47 kb/s, latency reduced to 17 cycles/block, and hardware efficiency remained high at 43.41 kbps/KGE, with a 0.2333 s reduction in execution time.

Conclusions:

• DNA-PRESENT effectively overcomes the confusion and diffusion limitations of the original PRESENT cipher.
• The enhanced security features of DNA-PRESENT offer a favorable trade-off for its marginal cost increase.
• The proposed algorithm presents a viable solution for securing data in resource-constrained IoT environments.