A Comparative Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms in the Internet of Things

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology is an integral part of Internet of Things (IoT) and the security of IoT will play a pivotal role in its deployment and commercialization. To secure communication in WSN, selecting appropriate encryption algorithm is essentially important because IoT devices are inherently low-powered and have limited resources. In this regard, in this paper, we compare diverse symmetric block-based cryptographic algorithms to comment on their capabilities that will aid in selecting the right algorithm for a specific application. We select widely used algorithms such as AES, CLEFIA, DES, Triple DES, IDEA, PRESENT, SEA, SPECK, TEA, XTEA and TWOFISH with different block and key lengths. The algorithms are compared from the perspective of energy, power and memory consumption, and throughput. The comparison is performed in Cooja simulator using z1 motes and the source code is published in the GitHub repository.