Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is paving its way into every aspect of human life. It makes the conventional processes smart and enables them to be completed quickly. Data is of paramount importance in IoT as it is critical for business progression. The security of such data is also crucial to prevent data breaches and loss of privacy. Cryptography is one of the common mechanisms used to implement data security. This paper provides a performance evaluation of contemporary block ciphers like DES, 3DES, AES, Blowfish, and Twofish. The goal is to evaluate the performance of existing well-known algorithms rather than selecting the nascent LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) algorithms. The selected ciphers are evaluated on a powerful desktop and a Raspberry Pi with limited resources. From the results, it is observed that Twofish performs better on IoT devices for smaller amounts of data, and it is also memory efficient than other evaluated ciphers. AES and Twofish performed better than other algorithms for various data input sizes. The results of this evaluation will be helpful for IoT architects in making decisions over the required cipher for securing the data in an IoT application.