Performance Comparison of Cryptosystems in Context to Internet of Things

The future of the internet―Internet of Things (IoT), is where billions of intelligent physical devices communicate with each other without human invention, making a better world. Real-time applications like smart cities, smart healthcare, medical, military, connected cars, etc., include massive data processing and transmission. As the IoT paradigm capturing a market, security has become a significant concern in IoT deployment. Cryptographic algorithms are a classical approach to protecting the communication channel. However, the IoT's low-power, heterogeneous and resource-constrained nature makes incorporating traditional security features extremely challenging. In this work, we compare applications, encryption (decryption) speed, area, and power overhead for three different encryption methods: RSA (public-key cryptosystem), AES (symmetrical block cipher), and monoalphabetic substitution cipher in the context of IoT. Further, to improve the resilience of the popular and robust AES cipher against side-channel attacks, we implement the masked S-box and analyze the overhead in contrast to the unmasked implementation.