Implementation of ChaCha20-Poly1305 on Self-Organization Data Framing for Enhancing IoT Communication

Abstract

Our study presents the implementation of a lightweight Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) and a self-organizing data framing in Internet of Things (IoT) communication. The frame structure on the node side offers extra fields for managing data bytes, calculating the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), and detecting the frame start and stop. Between an STM32 and an ESP32, the data framing is applied via the Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) protocol. High performance and security are achieved by implementing the ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD on the frame structure for nodecloud communication. Through logging, the frame structure is successfully identified on ESP32 and the IoT cloud. ChaCha20-Poly1305 algorithms are fully evaluated in cycle counting on the node-cloud communication using the System for Unified Performance Evaluation Related to Cryptographic Operations and Primitives (SUPERCOP) framework. The data framing gives the MCUs’ communications a foundation for error detection and synchronization failure prevention. Lastly, the IoT system’s node-cloud communications are encrypted and authenticated via the ChaCha20-Poly1305 process.