A Light Weight Stream Cypher Mechanism for Visible Light Communication

LED light has many advantages such as power efficient, better quality, long lifespan, and focus emission. LED lighting has been employed in our daily life in various ways, such as car lamps and lights in vehicles, roadside signal lights, indoor lighting systems, etc. The LED light bulbs not only can provide bright but also can be employed for data communication and object positioning, namely visible light communication (VLC). VLC is fast-growing technologies that enable new visible light application such as fast data transmission and indoor positioning. Due to its attractive functionalities, they have draw lots of attention to the wireless communication and indoor navigation systems. Because of its physical characteristics, “what you see is what you send”, VLC has been always considered as a secured communication method. In this work, we analyze the risks of visible light communication signal such as signal jamming, data snooping and modification. In order to effectively protect VLC data communication problems, we design a lightweight stream cypher data communication through the VLC signal to achieve the secure of the data communication. Experimental results of the proposed mechanism show that the WG-8 encryption algorithm can be executed on Raspberry Pi3 Model B, which has limited computing power. The evaluation result shows WG-8 support embedded system and CPU utilization reach up to 49%.