Cloud-native encryption as a service for IoT

Abstract

Abstract Encryption as a Service (EaaS) is a practical solution for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices that cannot efficiently execute costly cryptographic tasks locally. This paper presents a cloud-native EaaS platform implemented on Kubernetes and designed to support scalable encryption, decryption, and key-management services for IoT environments. The paper describes the functional architecture of the platform, defines its main service workflow, and introduces two deployment modes, namely cloud-based and fog-based deployment. The proposed platform is evaluated in terms of processing time, deployment time, and end-to-end response time. The results show that the fog-based deployment reduces the response time by at least $$16\%$$ for small payloads and by up to $$6.8\times$$ for larger payloads compared with the cloud-based mode. The deployment analysis also shows that increasing the number of replicas from 1 to 5 leads to a deployment-time increase of more than $$30\%$$ , while increasing the workload to 11 replicas results in an increase of about $$47\%$$ . In addition, the results indicate that the Key Manager is the most resource-intensive component and has the highest impact on pod readiness time. Overall, the findings show that the proposed Kubernetes-based EaaS platform can provide flexible and scalable cryptographic support for IoT systems, while fog-based placement offers clear latency advantages in the evaluated prototype setting.