All Things Encrypted

Are your Internet of Things devices and data safe?

IoT is expanding exponentially. There are already more than 21 Billion connected IoT devices in many diverse places such as the home, workplace, manufacturing, health, agriculture and any location where something needs to be measured or controlled remotely.

These devices connect across many different types of networks – Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Networks such as LoRaWAN and Sigfox), cellular Cat-M1, cellular NB-IoT, satellite and, of course, 5G.

LPWAN devices are usually compact, have limited processing power, consume minimal battery, and transmit small amounts of data, sometimes as little as 8 bytes, at irregular intervals. They are mainstream for applications such as smart meters, air quality monitoring, environment monitoring, smart agriculture and trackers.

Although LPWAN devices are affordable and straightforward, they can still transmit sensitive information within their payloads, which must be protected. Even if they use encryption such as AES128, because these devices have internal constraints, key generation is not random enough, leaving potential security holes.

To address the challenges faced by LPWAN devices, we have developed Beowulf, which is an efficient encryption solution. Beowulf is a patented symmetric key cryptography solution that consumes little energy and can update keys if Over the Air updates are available. Beowulf fits into less than 3kB of memory, maintains payload size post encryption and consumes less than half the energy of AES128.

Beowulf increases device security while not impairing device life.

And then there's Quantum Computing

The rapid advancement of Quantum Computing poses a fundamental threat to today’s digital security infrastructure. Many cryptographic mechanisms currently used to protect communications, cloud services, financial systems, and government networks will become vulnerable once large-scale quantum computers are realised. To mitigate this risk, global standards bodies are transitioning to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), which is designed to remain secure against quantum-enabled attacks.

Quantum computing will render many billions of existing devices open to attack - even with the equivalent of AES128, Beowulf is not enough. Any device that is being deployed today will be open to attack sometime in the near future, unless there is a way to secure it.

One of the leading post-quantum cryptography standards is NIST ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber), a lattice-based encryption scheme selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2024. While Kyber offers strong security guarantees, its practical deployment in IoT devices, and especially LPWAN, can be challenging due to high communication overhead and computational requirements. 

To overcome situations where IoT devices cannot support a full PQC solution, efficient PQC methods can be adopted to distribute updated keys, either regularly or on an as-needs basis using Unicast, Multicast or Broadcast communications. While the keys are AES128, their distribution is absolutely protected using PQC.

We are developing such a PQC key distribution solutions to protect LPWAN devices into the future.

Post-quantum cryptography is not optional—it is a necessary transition for future-proof secure communications. However, its success depends on efficient and scalable implementations. We provide practical solutions that help bridge the gap between cryptographic security theory and real-world IoT deployment, supporting secure, cost-effective, and scalable communication systems in the post-quantum era.

Our team is contributing to PQC with internationally recognised research work. With this we are addressing the most significant barrier to PQC adoption: efficiency at scale.

At AllThingsEncrypted we can help you to secure your Critical IoT applications and protect your IoT data in transit.

To find out more, contact us on info@allthingsencrypted.com. One of our consultants will be pleased to discuss your requirements.