A Review of Cryptographic Algorithms for the Internet of Things

Introduction

In recent years, the Internet of Things has witnessed rapid growth and is being perceived as hypernym for interconnected technologies, objects, devices, and services. Nevertheless, after years of contribution to this research, there is still no clear and universal definition of the concept. However, still, the application frameworks and opportunities offered in the market by objects are communicating actively far beyond specific horizons. The novel contributions, new applications, and services conceived by innovators and researchers are bewildering and clearly show the high and vast opportunities for our next generations. In the early 2000s, RFID technology was designed and developed mainly across the engineering sector for tracking and tracing goods. At the same time, research was conducted on sensor networks and miniaturized smart systems. The size of sensors was becoming very small and computing power dramatically increased. Nevertheless, innovative solutions were always developed and provided for specific application cases, and there was no absolute interconnectivity and interoperability between different application areas. For example, fields like logistics and manufacturing are well-known as they provide an immediate business benefit regarding asset tracking and supply chain management. However, real solutions cannot be applied to other fields such as demotics, where business synergies can provide services with obvious added-value benefits. As the IoT zone covers such a vast spectrum of application fields, the happening cycles and technologies used can be completely classified. Often, the developments in technology are driven by idealistic, tiny and medium-sized enterprises (SME) that try to meet targets try to catch ongoing trends at a faster pace. However, the target is usually an output within a narrow scope, the solutions are usually non-interoperable, and while successful, they are unable to produce a common abstract infrastructure capable of marking notable progress in the whole field. This holds for large-scale companies that usually develop dedicated solutions for specific business opportunities without implementing applicable concepts. Therefore, current solutions can still be seen as peaceful solutions, that can implement some “INTRAnet of Things” despite “INTERnet of Things.” While being logical regarding the point, in the long term, the prevailing situation is unsustainable. Nowadays, we can observe a situation of a similar sort to that in the networking field, where at its infancy many solutions are obtained but were subsequently discarded in favor of a unified communication infrastructure, the TCP/IP protocol suite. We do believe that different classes of devices will always co-exist. Taxonomies are to be created according to various principles, such as critical or non-critical, or distributed or centralized. These classes can promote different profiles as per the specific needs and requirements of domains and applications. By the reference model, we mean an abstract framework that comprises at least a set of unifying concepts and relationships for understanding essential relationships between the entities of an environment. This framework must be able to develop the specific architectures which may constitute different levels of abstraction. The high-level work used drives the realization of a framework for identifying specific reference architectures that subsequently define both essential building blocks as well as choices for the design dealing with different functionality, performance, deployment, and security. The main aim of the IoT-A project was to prove its work on the current state of the art, rather than deploying a clean slate approach. Because of this, common traits came into existence to form the baseline of the IoT Architectural Reference Model (ARM). The primary advantage of enacting this model is its backward compatibility.