A lightweight hybrid encryption scheme for secure IoT communications based on elliptic curve cryptography and a chaotic dynamic substitution box

Abstract

The rapid growth of interconnected systems, particularly within the Internet of Things (IoT), has significantly increased the volume of data exchanged across networks, making data security a critical challenge in environments with limited computational resources. Consequently, the design of lightweight encryption schemes that can simultaneously provide strong security and high efficiency has become increasingly important. In this article, a hybrid encryption scheme called SEC-Blowfish is proposed, which integrates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), chaotic mapping, and a dynamic S-Box generation mechanism. In the proposed approach, ECC is employed for secure key generation and exchange, while chaotic sequences and dynamically generated S-Boxes enhance the randomness of the encryption process and reduce predictable patterns in the ciphertext. This hybrid structure significantly strengthens the algorithm’s resistance against common cryptanalytic attacks, including statistical, linear, and differential analyses. To evaluate its effectiveness, the proposed algorithm is tested on text datasets of varying sizes, and the experimental results demonstrate that the method achieves strong data confidentiality while providing improved performance compared with several existing approaches. These findings indicate that SEC-Blowfish can serve as an efficient and reliable solution for securing data in resource-constrained environments, particularly in IoT systems and modern communication networks.