Intelligent Hybrid Selection of Secure and Energy-Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithms for Sustainable Internet of Things

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased the demand for secure and resource-efficient confidentiality mechanisms in constrained environments. Selecting an appropriate lightweight cipher is challenging because its implementation involves trade-offs among hardware resources, computational performance, memory, and energy requirements. This study presents an objective multi-criteria framework for evaluating well-established lightweight encryption algorithms using eight implementation-critical criteria: chip area, throughput, energy consumption, power consumption, latency, algorithm size, RAM size, and key size. The criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC) method is employed to determine objective criterion weights, while multiplicative exponential weighting (MEW), combinative distance-based assessment (CODAS), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) are used for comparative ranking. The proposed CRITIC multi-criteria framework enables systematic selection of lightweight ciphers by jointly considering computational, hardware, memory, and energy efficiency. By promoting low-power operation and efficient utilization of computational resources, the framework may contribute to more sustainable and resilient IoT infrastructures.