A lightweight cryptographic solution to secure digital transmissions on resource-constrained environments

The great revolution of technology and its fast growth have led to a cyber space increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. For this reason, cyber security becomes paramount to protect our cyber space by presenting and implementing important solutions to protect sensitive data from malicious persons. Thereby various measures of protection have been developed and aim to minimize the risks and damages of attacks. Among them, cryptography plays a vital and crucial role in protecting sensitive transmissions and electronic exchanges through complex networks. Numerous scientific studies have emerged with the advent of the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT); all of them have expressed a strong need for building secure, efficient and fast cryptosystems targeting confidentiality, integrity and authentication. The last two objectives are essentially built on hash functions which are the main components of many applications and secure networks. The purpose of this paper is to give recent advances of lightweight cryptographic solutions that meet the requirements of constrained systems, and to present a study, in terms of security, energy-consuming and efficiency, of the main hash functions standardized by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). In the end, the paper will give a comparison between the studied hash functions aiming to come up with a recommendation of good lightweight hash functions suitable for implementation in an IoT framework