A Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Cryptography in IoT LoRa Applications

The Internet of Things has been applied in different application contexts, ranging from industrial, healthcare or simple home life applications. It allows adding a new level of automation to objects, making them appealing to everyone. Since several applications involve data, and in some cases, it is sensitive, those applications are more vulnerable to be attacked. As a result, researchers are constantly exploring secure mechanisms to keep the data and its owners safe. For the resource-constrained nature of these IoT applications, the design of cryptography solutions becomes a challenging task because IoT nodes should be cheap and require low power, which means lower computational performance. Lightweight cryptography algorithms are attractive solutions to reduce computation complexity, keeping the desired level of security. This work provides an experimental performance analysis of several cryptography solutions targeted for embedded platforms to help choose better algorithms for IoT systems in terms of efficiency. Execution time, code efficiency and communication influences are evaluated for a set of cryptography algorithms. The results of this work intend to help IoT developers to choose a suitable cryptography algorithm for their IoT applications.