Lightweight encryption for privacy protection of data transmission in cyber physical systems

Cyber-physical system (CPS) devices like connected vehicles, consumer appliances, and many other smart devices are built with limited resources like processors and memory. These devices are used to transmit critical and sensitive data over the Internet, needing utmost privacy protection from any unauthorized access. In this paper, a lightweight secure encryption algorithm is proposed to protect the privacy of highly sensitive communication and imperturbable data transmission. The scheme is built using permutation, followed by a diffusion structure. The permutation uses pseudo-random sequences (PRNS) generated by a 3D Lorenz chaotic map, and the diffusion uses a key stream generated by a newly designed keystream generator (KSG) which uses only bit-shift and XOR operations. The simple and secure design makes the algorithm useful for CPS devices. The analysis of the test results shows that the proposed algorithm is secure enough and potentially capable of defying any known security attacks.