A modified lightweight DNA-based cryptography method for internet of things devices

The data generated by the applications of the internet of things (IoT) that transmit sensitive and secret information via wireless sensor networks (WSN) must be safeguarded as major components of any cyber physical system (CPS). Interconnected devices, such as IoT devices or objects are viewed as constrained because they lack adequate computational resources. These resources consist of energy, memory, and processing power, however, when attempting to encrypt transferred data using traditional encryption methods, these obstacles offered by IoT devices are viewed as a challenge because their limited resources may dramatically limit the potential and performance of CPS. Therefore, we introduced the modified DNA-based lightweight encryption method, which relies on the DNA sequence, as a way to get around the fact that IoT devices have insufficient computing processing and storage resources. The randomized structure of the DNA sequence was leveraged in the modified lightweight encryption method to obtain an encryption secret key. The secret key is employed to encrypt and decrypt data generated by IoT devices in a manner that is consistent with the computing capabilities of IoT devices during encryption operations involving substitution, transposition, and circular shifting to increase the confusion level of encrypted data. We also studied the effects of changing the size of the data block along with the key space of the modified DNA-based lightweight encryption method. Performance and experimental results in terms of key lengths, the amount of time it takes to encrypt, the degree of distortion, and the security level of the modified DNA-based lightweight encryption method surpass those of currently employed encryption algorithms.