Combining Merkle Hash Tree and Chaotic Cryptography for Secure Data Fusion in IoT

With the wide applicability of sensors in our daily lives, security has become one of the primary concerns in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Particularly, user's privacy and unauthorized access to sensitive information needs to be kept in mind while designing security algorithms. This paper puts forward a security protocol that integrates authentication of the deployed IoT devices and encryption of the generated data. We have modified the well-known Merkle Hash Tree to adapt to an IoT environment for authenticating the devices and utilized the concepts of Chaos theory for developing the encryption algorithm. The use of chaos in cryptography are known to satisfy the basic requirements of the cryptosystem such as, high sensitivity, high computational speed and high security. In addition, we have proposed a chaotic map named Quadratic Sinusoidal Map which exhibits better array of chaotic regime when compared to the traditional quadratic map. The security analysis demonstrate that the proposed protocol is simple having low computational requirements, has strong security capabilities and highly resilient to security attacks.