Security of Internet of Things using RC4 and ECC Algorithms (Case Study: Smart Irrigation Systems)

Internet of Things (IoT) deploys a wide range of technologies including wireless sensor networks, machine-to-machine communication, robots, internet technologies, and smart devices. IoT is a novel phenomenon in the IT world wherein objects can transmit data, and interact through the internet or intranet networks. But the most important and crucial issue on the IoT is privacy and data security. The objective of this paper is to create a new encryption model for data storage servers in an IoT-based irrigation systems. Thus, a hybrid encryption algorithm based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), RC4, and SHA-256 is proposed to protect sensitive data of IoT-based irrigation systems. The proposed model uses ECC to improve RC4. In RC4, XOR operation is performed using a key encrypted by ECC and shift-right, and then the resulting data are transformed to SHA-256 to ensure security. Simulation results indicate that encryption and decryption time in the proposed model are shorter than other models like XXTEA & ECC, XXTEA & RSA, ECC&3DES&SHA-256, RC4&3DES&SHA-256, AES&RC4&SHA-256, AES&3DES &SHA-256, RC4&AES&SHA-256, RC2&3DES&SHA-256, and ECC&RC2&SHA-256 with, 43.39%, 66.03%, 45.28%, 54.71%, 50.94%, 33.96%, 33.62%, 24.52%, and, 15.09% respectively.