Performance analysis of pharmaceutical cold chain monitoring on ESP32: encrypting thermal data using the NIST lightweight cryptography standard (Ascon)

Abstract

In modern medical logistics and pharmaceutical systems, temperature monitoring of

medicines is a crucial factor that ensures drug quality and safety. Often, this sensi- tive data is vulnerable to cyberattacks and unauthorized access when transmitted or

stored digitally. The aim is to develop a secure temperature encryption and decryption system for medicine datasets using an ESP32 microcontroller. The primary objective is

to compare the encryption time and performance between ASCON [1], AES [2], ChaCha- 20 Poly1305 [3], TinyJAMBU [4], and GIFT-COFB [3] using ESP32. The methodol- ogy includes collecting a dataset containing medicine-related attributes, extracting the

temperature column, applying the chosen encryption—NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standard (ASCON) [1], AES-GCM (Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode) [2], ChaCha20-Poly1305 [3], TinyJAMBU [4], and GIFT-COFB [3]—via ESP32, analyzing performance metrics including encryption time and computational efficiency. After encryption, we design a prototype with a DHT22 sensor [5] that will detect the

temperature data and work with ESP32 to encrypt the data, sending the data to a ver- ified person. For this, we design a protocol that provides replay protection and device

authentication [6] so that medicines are safer from targeted attackers. The contribution is a measurement of encryption latency, code size, and power consumption, showing that ASCON achieves significantly higher performance and energy efficiency while maintaining adequate security, making it more suitable for constrained IoT devices [1]. Furthermore, we remove the printstate function to run in lesser time while also removing the debugging setup in anyday use.