A Lightweight Image Encryption Algorithm for Secure Communications in Multimedia Internet of Things

Devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) have resource constraints in terms of energy, computing power, and memory that make them vulnerable to some security attacks. Due to the increasing volume of multimedia content, lightweight encryption algorithms have been developed to allow IoT nodes to communicate securely with the least computational complexity and bandwidth usage. To adapt the low data rate of IoT devices, a lightweight data compression algorithm for image encryption is proposed in this paper which utilizes scan-based block compression and selective pixel encryption approach to encrypt the image data in only one round, resulting in low computational complexity and reduced data volume. The results of the implementing the proposed approach in IoT testbed show that, on average, the power consumption of the devices and packet rate is decreased by 15% and 26%, respectively, compared to the existing algorithms.