An Ultra Lightweight Cipher Algorithm For IoT Devices and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Drones and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become of paramount importance to individuals, entities, organizations, and states due to the benefits they provide in daily life. Most of the consumer devices around us have become connected to the Internet, no matter how small they are, including smart home applications, automatic sensors, portable medical devices, implants inside the human body, etc. The connection of these devices to the Internet has opened the way for many intrusions, either to steal data or cause harm to humans. This research suggests a method to protect this data from being exposed to security breaches by proposing a new lightweight encryption algorithm. The proposed algorithm presents new ways to encrypt data by exploiting the different faces of the characters in ASCII code, where the text is converted into four different forms, including binary, hexadecimal, characters, and digits. Each of these forms undergoes a certain process, either summation or subtracting, or passing it through the logic gates to obtain high encoding confidentiality to give more complexities to increase data security. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm show a significant improvement in coding rate with high encryption and decryption speeds, in addition to the correlation coefficient and entropy reaching -0.4735 and 7.9983, respectively.