Lightweight Secure and Scalable Scheme for Data Transmission in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly permeating critical domains, enabling the interconnection and utilization of diverse devices on a large scale while streaming vast volumes of data. In domains like telehealth, intelligent transportation, and autonomous agriculture, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of collected and exchanged data is paramount. However, the resource limitations and heterogeneous nature of IoT devices often render traditional cryptography-based techniques ineffective or even infeasible for secure data transmission. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop and implement lightweight, secure, and scalable schemes for data transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel Lightweight Secure and Scalable Scheme (LS3) for data transmission in IoT environments. LS3 is comprised of three phases and utilizes an efficient combination of symmetric keys and Elliptic Curve Menezes–Qu–Vanstone asymmetric key agreement protocol. Through a comprehensive analysis, we demonstrate that LS3 excels in terms of security and scalability and outperforms other existing schemes in terms of computation and communication costs.