A distributed approach to energy-efficient data confidentiality in the Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT) everything will be connected, from refrigerators to coffee machines, to shoes. Many such “things” will have a very limited amount of energy to operate, often harvested from their own environment. Providing data conf identiality for such energy-constrained devices has proven to be a hard problem. In this article, we discuss existing approaches to data-confidentiality for energyconstrained devices and propose a novel approach to drastically reduce a node’s energy consumption during encryption and decryption. In particular, we propose to distribute encryption and decryption computations among a set of trusted nodes. We validate the proposed approach through both simulations and experiments. Initial results show that the proposed approach leads to energy savings (from a single node’s perspective) of up to 73% and up to 81% of the energy normally spent to encrypt and decrypt, respectively. With such great savings, our approach holds the promise to enable data confidentiality also for those devices, with extremely limited energy, which will become commonplace in the IoT.