Design and Implementation of Cryptographic Data Security for IoT Devices Using Unicode & ASCII

Abstract- The study on the design and implementation of cryptographic data security for IoT devices using Unicode and ASCII is motivated by the high rate of insecurity of data observed during data transfers on IoT devices. IoT devices are one of the popular channels that assist users to communicate virtually from the comfort of their homes. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design software for cryptographic data security that can encrypt data while in transit to another IoT device using a cipher algorithm based on symmetric encryption. Some related encryption algorithms were also reviewed. In gathering data, secondary sources were deployed for useful information. The waterfall development methodology was utilized in this work. It is a methodology where phases do not overlap and the input of the current phase is the output of the previous phase. The use of Unicode and ASCII in substitution and transposition techniques helped to achieve confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and guaranteed data security. The system was implemented using the PHP programming language, HTML, and CSS. The results obtained from this research indicate that the software outperforms other conventional encryption algorithms in terms of speed (it encrypted 148 kb of data in 0.00267 MS) and also in terms of cryptanalyst attacks such as brute-force and dictionary attacks. The software is highly recommended to individual users, network administrators, medical centers, educational institutions, and government organizations.