Efficiency Analysis of Lightweight RSA and ASCON Algorithms for Secure IoT Environments

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT), where billions of connected devices share sensitive data over environments with limited resources, security is still a major concern. For Internet of Things-based smart city applications, this paper compares the Lightweight RSA (LWRSA) and ASCON algorithms. While ASCON, a NIST-standardized cipher, offers authenticated encryption and hashing utilizing permutation-based construction, LWRSA modifies conventional RSA through smaller key sizes and optimized key creation. Experimental evaluation is carried out on datasets of different sizes, examining key generation overhead, memory usage, encryption time, and decryption time. The findings indicate that LWRSA is more appropriate for latency-sensitive IoT systems because it achieves much shorter computation times for both small (3.51 MB) and large (27 MB) datasets, whereas ASCON exhibits higher computational overhead but more standardized security assurances. The results indicate that while ASCON is still preferred for long-term resilience in installations with limited resources, LWRSA is useful for time-sensitive IoT applications.