Analysis and Optimization of Advanced Encryption Standard for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things creates advanced application systems requiring minimum human interaction by integrating entities having unique addressing mechanisms with digital processing platforms by communicating in a network. The Internet of Things devices being resource constrained are prone to attacks and security breaches. Conventional cryptographic procedures are not viable for Internet of Things and embedded applications as the computations involved with them require higher processing power, memory and energy. Lightweight cryptographic techniques can be used in resource constrained Internet of Things devices to mitigate the security issues. These lightweight cryptographic solutions use smaller key sizes, smaller block sizes and lesser number of rounds. This paper uses a lightweight cryptographic algorithm, AES (Advanced Encryption Algorithm) which is one of the efficient and robust algorithms, to secure communication in the wireless sensor networks. The experimentation uses UDP protocol for transmissions and Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy networks (RPL) for packet delivery from source to destination. Later, the performance of different variants of AES is checked by performing the power analysis. The results demonstrate that AES-192 and AES-256 with 8 rounds show optimized results in terms of power, thus making it suitable for power constrained devices.