Securing internet of things devices using a hybrid approach.

With increased Internet of Things (IoT) devices, complexity and protection are more challenging. Lightweight cryptographic algorithms are secure and suitable for limited-resource environments; however, their hash functions provide encrypted data but not integrity. Strong security features are available, but setup is difficult and expensive. Network security mechanisms increase power consumption and latency. As IoT networks grow, managing cryptographic keys and securely authenticating large numbers of devices become complex tasks. Efficient key management strategies are required to ensure the scalability required. Existing state-of-the-art solutions lack standardization, scalability, complex and costly. Thus, this research proposes a secure solution for IoT resource-constrained devices, combining strong data integrity and lightweight encryption, and is thus named a hybrid. This hybrid approach integrates SHA-512 and the PRESENT cipher in our proposed approach and thus ensuring higher security than state-of-the-art models. This intelligent combination not only enhances the algorithm’s resistance against cryptographic attacks but also improves its processing speed. The proposed approach is used to reduce the processing time for encryption in the IoT platform and to preserve the trade-off between security and efficiency. In terms of memory use, execution time, and precision, the proposed approach is compared with recent state-of-the-art research. The experimental results indicate that our approach is efficient using the avalanche, authentication success rate, collision events, and execution time. The efficiency is 53% to 65%, and the avalanche effect indicates sensitivity to input variations, suggesting moderate-to-considerable reactivity to small data changes. The experimental tests conducted across 10,000 and 80,000 runs reveal no collisions and found that the proposed approach is resilient in managing unique IDs. Moreover, our approach performs consistently, with an average execution time of 0.088246 s, ranging from 0.075954 to 0.094583 s. Finally, our approach provides a practical and scalable solution for securing IoT devices in resource-constrained environments, addressing practical problems for IoT devices.