Unconventional Security for IoT: Hardware and Software Implementation of a Digital Chaotic Encrypted Communication Scheme

The two main issues in the area of the Internet of Things are low-resource consumption and secure data transmission. Conjugating both is fairly hard on ensuring security, leading to great efforts in research. The standard cryptography methods currently proposed are based on simplifications of standard protocols, but are still demanding on resources. Chaotic encryption is a way to reduce this burden, while keeping an equivalent level of security. In this article, we propose, for the first time, a purely digital scheme for chaotic secure communications, able to be implemented in hardware or software without occupying most of the available resources. Next to the delivered analysis of the system, the experimental demonstration on both FPGA and ESP32 Arduino platforms of chaotic synchronization between transmitter and receiver, included examples of applied encrypted communication in the case of consecutive picture and text transmissions.