Efficient Key Management in Lightweight Cryptography: A New Hashing-Based Approach

Lightweight encryption methods are introduced to overcome the challenges of high-power consumption and high memory usage in the traditional cryptography system. The primary goal of the lightweight encryption technique is to make it suitable for use in devices provided with lower power and small memories. The importance of lightweight cryptosystem is its ability to provide suitable security for data encryption without consuming high level of power and without need for big memories. As the devices with lower battery life and supplied low memory become widespread, encryption key management problems start to emerge. This may lead to a high possibility of an attack on the encryption key and break the encryption system. In this context, this paper proposes a novel hashing- based approach for key generation in lightweight cryptography. The approach involves generating significant hash digits from a seed input to the hashing system, and then using hash code slicing to select different characters and numbers that can be used as a seed for the key generating system. The practical results, which demonstrate that a small seed length can effectively generate a large key length, are a testament to the effectiveness of the proposed approach. These results can be used in the encryption process to reduce the initial total bits, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the system.

I. Introduction

The devices that need to secure data deal with the need to implement encryption methods to resist confidential attacks. Traditional encryption methods such as Advance Encryption Standard (AES) and Data encryption standard (DES) consume large amounts of power and memory [1] which is not available for small devices such as Internet of Things devices (IoT). These devices cannot utilize traditional encryption methods such as AES. In order to overcome the problem of power consumption, lightweight encryption have been developed to suite the devices made with constraint resources. The major goal of lightweight encryption techniques is to achieve highest level of encryption security for the devices characterized by lower power supply and end small memory provided. It is worth mentioning that one of the side benefits of adopting lightweight encryption techniques is to make the battery life supplied to the small device last for a long time helping many applications that are facing difficulties in replacing batteries, such as devices implemented in the human bodies for medical needs (Lara- Nino, Diaz-Perez et al. 2020, Thakor, Razzaque et al. 2021). The other significant problem facing the encryption system is when the devices are very large, in this case, the cryptosystem needs to be adaptable to beat the key management. In the big system which involve large number of devices, the key management is start to appear. Many research has been done in the key management field to keep key generation systems secure, the problem is when implement key management for small devices but with large number, in this case the research needs to develop key management approach that take in its account the power consumption limitation and other resource constrain. If the utilized key management approach fails, it can result in illegal access, data breaches, and compromised data integrity. Therefore, the significance of this research for IoT security and data integrity cannot be overstated, as it has the potential to significantly enhance the security and integrity of IoT systems.