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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\n                    <jats:inline-formula>\n                      <jats:tex-math>$$16\\%$$<\/jats:tex-math>\n                    <\/jats:inline-formula>\n                    for small payloads and by up to\n                    <jats:inline-formula>\n                      <jats:tex-math>$$6.8\\times$$<\/jats:tex-math>\n                    <\/jats:inline-formula>\n                    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\n                    <jats:inline-formula>\n                      <jats:tex-math>$$30\\%$$<\/jats:tex-math>\n                    <\/jats:inline-formula>\n                    , while increasing the workload to 11 replicas results in an increase of about\n                    <jats:inline-formula>\n                      <jats:tex-math>$$47\\%$$<\/jats:tex-math>\n                    <\/jats:inline-formula>\n                    . 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.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1038\/s41598-026-52815-x","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,15]],"date-time":"2026-07-15T14:26:33Z","timestamp":1784125593000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Cloud-native encryption as a service for IoT"],"prefix":"10.1038","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Amir","family":"Javadpour","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Tarik","family":"Taleb","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chafika","family":"Benzaid","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Khaled","family":"Zeraoulia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Abderezzak","family":"Djebrani","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Mohamed Yacine","family":"Belhadi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Luis","family":"Cordeiro","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Lu\u00eds","family":"Rosa","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"52815_CR1","unstructured":"Javadpour, A. et al. 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