A Performance-Security Balanced Framework for Lightweight Cryptography Incorporating Hardware Acceleration and Adaptive Key Exchange in IoT Environments

Abstract

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has intensified the demand for lightweight cryptography that can secure billions of resource-constrained devices without prohibitive costs in energy or latency. This paper proposes a performance–security balanced framework that specifies (i) an adaptive key exchange protocol based on X25519 with HKDF-SHA256, (ii) authenticated encryption using ChaCha20-Poly1305 or AES-GCM with strict nonce/counter management, and (iii) hardware acceleration on ARM Cortex-M4 and FPGA modules to reduce computation and energy overhead. Protocol message flows, nonce/rekey rules, and full test vectors are provided to ensure reproducibility. Experimental evaluation on structured IoT traffic datasets shows that hardware-assisted AEAD achieves up to 38% lower encryption latency and 29% reduced energy consumption compared to software-only baselines. Security validation includes formal arguments, replay/MITM/downgrade attack experiments, and side-channel leakage assessment (TVLA), all of which confirm robustness against the defined threat model. The resulting framework offers a quantifiable and reproducible approach to securing IoT infrastructures in domains such as healthcare, smart cities, industrial networks, and intelligent transportation systems.