Cryptanalysis of Lightweight Block Ciphers using Metaheuristic Algorithms in Cloud of Things (CoT)

The Cloud of Things (CoT) has transformed communication and network technologies by expanding the Iimitation of IoT devices. The Cloud of Things is a fusion of Cloud Computing with IoT that provides endless storage, networking, and compute capabilities to IoT devices. Cloud of Things (CoT) has substantially boosted IoT applications in healthcare, automotive, agriculture, education, welfare, and businesses. Even though Cloud of Things (CoT) is scalable, faster, cost-effective, and remotely accessible,it also faces many challenges like interoperability, compatibility, performance, longevity, and security. Security is the biggest hurdle in adopting Cloud of Things (CoT) because it directly involves users’ private data. Researchers and academicians are equally concerned and proposed various lightweight block ciphers (LWBC) to secure the user’s data. In this paper, the relative cryptographic strength of three lightweight block ciphers (LWBC) is measured by performing Cryptanalysis with three metaheuristic algorithms using the proposed framework. The chosen three lightweight block ciphers (LWBC) are SIMON, SPECK, and PRESENT ciphers, which belong to different categories of Lightweight Block Ciphers (LWBC), and three metaheuristic algorithms are Cuckoo Search (CS), Whale optimization Algorithm (WOA), and Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA). The result of the experiments shows that SIMON and SPECK are equally strong while PRESENT is a relatively weak cipher. Also, the Cuckoo Search (CS) is found to be better than both WOA and SSA. However, for the weak keys, WOA is able to break all three ciphers completely.X