Secure Data Transmission Using Cryptographic Algorithms in IoT Networks

Abstract

The high-rate growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices highlighted the issue of secure transmission of data given rigid restrictions of energy, memory, and computational power. The overall goal of the study is to evaluate and review the existing cryptographic solutions in the context of IoT settings, and, specifically, lightweight security solutions that can be used in the limited devices. It is done in the methodological way of the systematic review and comparative analysis of symmetric, asymmetric, and hybrid cryptographic algorithms which include lightweight block ciphers, elliptic-curve-based algorithms and combined cryptography and steganography. Measures of performance like computational overhead, energy usage, latency, memory usage, and security level are analyzed in a wide variety of IoT application cases like wireless sensor networks and medical IoT systems. The comparison shows that the lightweight cryptography schemes are far more efficient than the traditional schemes with acceptable levels of security, which render them a good fit when high efficiency is required in an iaot node, e.g., in low-power nodes. Nevertheless, there are always trade-offs between the robustness of security and the use of resources and no single algorithm is optimal in all application cases. The introduction of such trends like encryption supported by hardware and smart, or adaptive security systems can be regarded as promising in overcoming these limitations. The research finds that the cryptographic methods of context-aware, hybrid, and scalable approaches ought to be employed as a fundamental component of the IoT security framework in the future in order to balance efficiency and security, and, thus, contribute to the improvement of the overall reliability and trustworthiness of the IoT based systems.