Lightweight Key Generation in IoT

Abstract

The steady growth of active IoT devices has made the question of secure communication by non-traditional digital devices more relevant than ever. One aspect of such security that currently lacks standards is lightweight key generation. The emergence of post-quantum computing, while still novel, presents another dimension on the issue of key generation. In this paper, the key generation of RSA, FourQ, Curve25519, and Streamlined NTRU Prime are benchmarked on three low-power IoT devices. RSA and Curve25519 are selected because they are standard choices in many communication protocols used today. FourQ is selected because it is the fastest Elliptic Curve known right now, with a similar security-level as Curve25519. Streamlined NTRU Prime is selected as it is a post-quantum secure public-key algorithm with relatively small key size. This paper shows that FourQ, Curve25519, and Streamlined NTRU Prime is viable on low-power IoT devices while also presenting a lightweight implementation of Streamlined NTRU Prime which is better suited for use on low-power resource-constrained IoT devices.