Final Year Project

Project Title

LWC VPN for IoT

Description

My Final Year Project involves developing a lightweight VPN for resource-constrained IoT devices (ESP32-class). Standard VPN solutions are too heavy for low-power embedded hardware, leaving IoT deployments vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and data interception. Our VPN achieves secure end-to-end communication by combining X25519 ECDH for key exchange, HKDF for session key derivation, and Ascon — the NIST Lightweight Cryptography winner — as the symmetric cipher. The aim is to minimize handshake overhead, memory footprint, and power consumption while maintaining strong security guarantees. Findings so far show our solution significantly outperforms traditional VPN stacks on embedded hardware across all three metrics, providing a practical, deployable security layer for real-world IoT networks without expensive hardware upgrades.