Lightweight encryption for smart home

Smart home is one of the most popular IoT (Internet of Things) applications, which connects a wide variety of objects and home appliances in a single logical network. Smart home applications have benefited from interactions and data transmissions among different devices over the integrated network with or without human interventions. However, like other technologies, smart home likely introduces new security vulnerabilities due to its dynamic and open nature of connectivity with heterogeneous features. Among such vulnerabilities, is the breach of confidentiality which needs to be addressed urgently as data exchanged between smart home devices can contain crucial information related to user's privacy and safety. However, some of the challenges in providing smart home system with confidentiality service are the flexibility of key management and efficiency of computation and communication. These challenges should be addressed carefully as many small and resource-constrained devices are usually involved in smart home systems. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a lightweight encryption scheme for smart homes. This scheme will provide users and smart objects with confidentiality service without incurring much overhead cost associated with computation and communication. Our proposed scheme also supports flexible public key management through adopting identity-based encryption, which does not require complex certificate handling. We provide a formal security analysis of our scheme and a performance simulation study. The simulation shows that our scheme provides favorable level of efficiency in terms of overhead cost associated with computation and communication.