A Lightweight Message Authentication Code for Virtual Work in Future Smart Cities

Data security remains a severe challenge of every IoT setting. As smart devices exchange data and information over the internet, there is a growing concern over securing the integrity and confidentiality of this exchange. Recently the NIST called for submission of proposals for lightweight cryptographic algorithms, to be deployed in IoT devices and other CPU and memory-constrained environment. While many of the submissions are based on existing block cyphers or hash functions, this paper presents a proof-of-concept lightweight MAC uses a Permutation-Quasigroup string transformation as a building block. The string transformation function is initially proposed as a building block for an error detection system in our earlier work. The MAC is implemented and run on a Raspberry Pi B+ single-board computer (SBC), and the result shows that for 3.73%, 3.55% and 2.82% of CPU resources are utilized for hashing messages of size 32 bits, 64 bits and 128 bits respectively. Similarly, the execution time of 0.7secs, 1.02secs and 2.34secs are achieved for hashing messages of size 32 bits, 64 bits and 128 bits respectively. Randomness test was conducted using the NIST statistical test suite, and the result shows that output is sufficiently random. Finally, the MAC is resistant to key exhaustive search attack and is easy to implement.