An Efficient and Reliable Chaos-Based IoT Security Core for UDP/IP Wireless Communication

The ultimate focus of this paper is to provide a hyperchaos-based reconfigurable platform for the real-time securing of communicating embedded systems interconnected in networks according to the Internet of Things (IoT) standards. The proposed platform’s Register Transfer Level (RTL) architecture is entirely developed and designed from scratch using the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL). The original idea consists of exploiting the nonlinearity of a discretized and optimized 4D Lorenz hyperchaotic system as an encryption keystream generator in a symmetric cryptosystem to secure wireless communicating embedded systems and adapted to the UDP/IP protocol. It was necessary to go through three essential steps to achieve this goal. First, a lightweight and energy-efficient hyperchaos-based encryption IP core is designed, implemented on an FPGA circuit and dedicated to IoT device security, denoted Hyperchaotic-based IoT Device Security Core (HC-IoT-DSC). The designed encryption IP core combines three subsystems: a multiple key size hyperchaotic key generator (HC-KG), a hyperchaotic synchronization by dynamic feedback modulation technique (HCS-DFM), and an online FIPS 140-2-based built-in self-security test (BISST) module. Second, a secure UDP/IP stack is totally implemented using the VHDL language. Third, the proposed architecture was integrated into real-world and real-time secure wireless communication at a distance of 2 km between two delocalized network nodes employing the Xilinx ML605 FPGA platform and the ZigBee E800-DTU module. A panoply of online/offline investigations and experiments were carried out intensely, deeply, and thoroughly to analyze, evaluate and validate the robustness and security aspects of the proposed scheme regarding all the aspects related to embedded system security. Notably, the evaluations were conducted in two phases for all the platform components before and after integrating the proposed security core in real-time wireless communication. The investigations and implementation findings validate that the proposed architecture can attain good performances, and confirm the feasibility of the adopted approach for IoT applications. Furthermore, the timing and power efficiency results present an excellent trade-off between design performance and high-security achievement.