Lightweight Internet of Things Encryption Using Galois Extension Field Arithmetic

This paper provides a cryptographic extension to related work on the use of Galois Extension Field techniques [1] to combine multiple output streams from independent pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs), modified for use in low-power stream-cipher cryptographic applications. The core extension field techniques are shown to be computationally efficient, scalable, and support a variety of contextual variations that make them suited for improving cryptography on low power Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This paper focuses specifically on the use in scalable, multi-party cryptographic algorithms, with a focus on the invertible transforms that may be applied in the extension field to rapidly encrypt and decrypt data. A key benefit of this technique is the ability to exploit the associative property of the underlying arithmetic to interchange the order of parties encrypting or decrypting the data stream without limitation, making the technique highly versatile, meeting a number of IoT use cases. Testing has shown that this technique passes NIST's test suite for randomness indicating that the produced ciphertext is indistinguishable from a randomly generated sequence. MSP430 implementations in C indicate that this encryption scheme is faster and more energy efficient than AES.