Abstract
Internet of Things is an internetwork where people interact with the
environment via sensors and machines to perform physical activities remotely. IoT
allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely via internet such as changing the
room temperature by controlling an air conditioner, switching on the lights in your
apartment, using smart watches to gather information about your body health (blood
pressure and heart beat rate) and sends it to your private doctor to monitor it and so on.
Performing a research on issues faced with IoT, it was realized that most challenges
were of privacy/confidentiality and data integrity. This project further conducts
research on finding ways of securing information that is shared between two or more
interactive IoT devices. The main objective of the project was to develop a strategy of
securing the IoT technology world. The method that was proposed to provide data
security and integrity was through cryptographic methods/security algorithms that
require decent memory and equitable CPU processing power .There were three security
methods that were focused on in this project i.e. RSA, AES and TDES algorithms.
Each of the encryption/decryption methods were presented with their detailed design
and functionality. The most suitable and better performing security algorithm for IoT
technology was chosen according to the measures of time, memory and processing
power. With the tests performed on the proposed security algorithms, AES encryption
standard seemed to perform better than other security algorithms in terms
computational time, memory consumption and the required processing power. The test
results also showed that it has a large encryption/decryption key size which also means
better protection for data. However through testing of the encryption methods there
were shortcomings that were encountered such as inability of the security algorithms to
provide authentication and encrypt different data formats such as video, picture and
audio. The short comings will be further dealt with on the future work. The success of
this research has potential impact on increasing the security of IoT internetwork which
intern will increase the number of users in the IoT world.