Chained Compressed Sensing: A Blockchain-Inspired Approach for Low-Cost Security in IoT Sensing

Abstract

Chaining, i.e., the mode of operation in which each message is encrypted considering a digital summary of previous ones, is here applied to block-cipher stages based on compressed sensing. We show that this simple and parsimonious technique may significantly harden the resulting system with respect to common threats such that ciphertext-only, known-plaintext, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Non-negligible robustness comes at the price of not more than a 2% of energy overhead with respect to the pure compression stage which represents a 24× reduction with respect to straightforward implementation of a traditional cryptography primitive like Advanced Encryption Standard.