Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Smart Video Applications

Abstract: The future generation networks: Internet of things (IoT), in combination with the advanced computer vision techniques poses new challenges for securing videos for end-users. The visual devices generally have constrained resources in respects to their low computation power, small memory with limited power supply. Therefore, to facilitate the video security in smart environment, lightweight security schemes are required instead of inefficient existing traditional cryptography algorithms. This research paper provides the solution to overcome such problems. A novel lightweight cipher algorithm is proposed here which targets multimedia in IoT with an in-house name EXPer i.e. Extended permutation with eXclusive OR (XOR). EXPer is a symmetric stream cipher that consists of simple XOR and left shift operations with three keys of 128 bits. The proposed cipher algorithm has been tested on various sample videos. Comparison of proposed algorithm has been made with the traditional cipher algorithms XOR and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Visual results confirm that EXPer provides security level equivalent to the AES algorithm with less computational cost than AES. Therefore, it can easily be perceived that the EXPer is a better replacement of AES for securing real-time video applications in IoT.