LWE: An Energy-Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Medical Sensors and IoT Devices

Abstract

In today's world, systems generate and exchange digital data frequently and face a much broader range of threats than in the past. Within the context of this unsafe ecosystem, it is crucial to protect the data in a quick and secure way. In this paper, it is proposed that a lightweight block cipher algorithm called LWE in the purpose of having an encryption algorithm that is light enough for restricted/limited hardware environments and secure enough to endure primal cryptanalysis attacks. The length of blocks to be encrypted is set to 64 bits and the key length is defined as 64 bits. It is targeted for IoT systems with low-end microcontrollers and body sensor area devices. The performance and security aspects of LWE are evaluated with well-known algorithms and it is observed that LWE can establish a basic security baseline for transmitting raw data without creating a heavy load on the network infrastructure.