Lightweight Cryptographic Watermarking Architecture for Resource-Constrained IoT and Edge Devices
Keywords:
Edge computing security, IoT security, Lightweight cryptography, PRESENT Cypher, Resource-constrained watermarkingAbstract
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems and edge computing infrastructures has created an urgent demand for security mechanisms capable of operating within the stringent resource constraints characteristic of embedded platforms—including limited computational capacity, minimal memory footprint, and severe power budgets. Conventional cryptographic watermarking schemes, designed for general-purpose computing environments, impose computational overhead that renders them impractical for deployment on microcontroller-class devices with clock frequencies below 100 MHz and available RAM of 64–512 KB. This paper proposes a novel Lightweight Cryptographic Watermarking Architecture (LCWA) specifically engineered for resource-constrained IoT and edge devices, integrating the PRESENT-80 lightweight block cypher with a computationally efficient Least Significant Bit Frequency Domain (LSBFD) watermarking scheme optimised through bitwise operations and lookup table acceleration. The architecture implements a pipeline processing model that overlaps cryptographic and watermarking operations, significantly reducing total processing latency compared to sequential execution. Hardware-software co-design principles are employed to identify and accelerate the computational hot-spots of both the cypher and watermarking algorithm through dedicated hardware acceleration units. The proposed architecture was implemented on an Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller platform for comprehensive evaluation. Results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves 98.7% of the security efficacy of full AES-256-DWT watermarking while consuming only 12.3% of the computational resources, 8.7% of the memory footprint, and 15.4% of the power consumption. The achieved throughput of 3.8 Mbps on the ARM Cortex-M4 platform at 168 MHz is sufficient for real-time protection of IoT sensor data streams.
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