Analysis of Lightweight Message Authentication Codes for IoT Environments

Abstract

In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) have spread everywhere from smart home to wireless sensor networks. The physical devices connected to the internet in IoT networks are resource constrained, so implementing security using conventional cryptographic algorithms are not suitable for these resource constrained devices. Recently, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published the techniques of lightweight cryptography, which provides a way to implement security in a limited resource environment (IoT environment). Lightweight Message Authentication Code (MAC) is one of the technique in lightweight cryptography. This paper provides an overview of performance analysis of the lightweight cryptography algorithms, which are hash-based Lightweight MAC - LightMAC, CHASKEY on NUCLEO-F401RE IoT board, which has STM32F401RE microcontroller. Performance of these algorithms is analyzed based on the power consumption, memory consumption, execution time and throughput with various supported key sizes and message lengths.