A Hybrid Cryptographic Mechanism for Secure Data Transmission in Edge AI Networks

As Edge AI systems become more prevalent, ensuring data privacy and security in these decentralized networks is essential. In this work, a novel hybrid cryptographic mechanism was presented by combining Ant Lion Optimization (ALO) and Diffie–Hellman-based Twofish cryptography (DHT) for secure data transmission. The developed work collects the data from the created edge AI system and processes it using the Autoencoder. The Autoencoder learns the data patterns and identifies the malicious data entry. The Diffie–Hellman (DH) key exchange generates a shared secret key for encryption, while the ALO optimizes the key exchange and improves security performance. Further, the Twofish algorithm performs the data encryption using a generated secret key, preventing security threats during transmission. The implementation results of the study show that it achieved a higher accuracy of 99.45%, lower time consumption of 2 s, minimum delay of 0.8 s, and reduced energy consumption of 3.2 mJ.