Lattice-Based Public Key Cryptosystem for Internet of Things Environment: Challenges and Solutions

Due to its widespread popularity and usage in many applications (smart transport, energy management, e-healthcare, smart ecosystem, and so on), the Internet of Things (IoT) has become popular among end users over the last few years. However, with an exponential increase in the usage of IoT technologies, we have been witnessing an increase in the number of cyber attacks on the IoT environment. An adversary can capture the private key shared between users and devices and can launch various attacks, such as IoT ransomware, Mirai botnet, man-in-the-middle, denial of service, chosen plaintext, and chosen ciphertext. To mitigate these security attacks on the IoT environment, the traditional public key cryptographic primitives are inadequate because of their high computational and communication costs. Therefore, lattice-based public-key cryptosystem (LB-PKC) is a promising technique for secure communication. We discuss the taxonomy of two major problems, namely, the shortest path and the closest path problems with respect to the applicability of lattice-based cryptographic primitives for IoT devices. Moreover, we also discuss various LB-PKC techniques, such as NTRU, learning with errors (LWEs), and ring-LWE (R-LWE) which are often used to solve shortest path and lattice NP-hard problems in a polynomial time. We further classify the R-LWE into three categories, namely identity-based encryption, homomorphic encryption, and secure authentication key exchange. We describe the operations and algorithms adopted in each of these encryption mechanisms. Finally, we discuss the challenges, open issues, and future directions for applying LB-PKC in the IoT environment.