White-Box cryptography based data encryption-decryption scheme for IoT environment

The economic progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) is phenomenal. Applications range from checking the alignment of some components during a manufacturing process, monitoring of transportation and pedestrian levels to enhance driving and walking path, remotely observing terminally ill patients by means of medical devices such as implanted devices and infusion pumps, and so on. To provide security, encrypting the data becomes an indispensable requirement, and symmetric encryptions algorithms are becoming a crucial implementation in the resource constrained environments. Typical symmetric encryption algorithms like Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) showcases an assumption that end points of communications are secured and that the encryption key being securely stored. However, devices might be physically unprotected, and attackers may have access to the memory while the data is still encrypted. It is essential to reserve the key in such a way that an attacker finds it hard to extract it. At present, techniques like White-Box cryptography has been utilized in these circumstances. But it has been reported that applying White-Box cryptography in IoT devices have resulted in other security issues like the adversary having access to the intermediate values, and the practical implementations leading to Code lifting attacks and differential attacks. In this paper, a solution is presented to overcome these problems by demonstrating the need of White-Box Cryptography to enhance the security by utilizing the cipher block chaining (CBC) mode.