Investigating and Analyzing the Light-weight ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

TheWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are characterized by the severe constraints in the computational, storage and energy resources. Though there has been significant improvement in the availablecomputational resources due to the proliferation of the next-generation sensor nodes, the energy and storageresources of sensor nodes are still limited. As the sensor nodes are often deployed in ubiquitous andpervasive environments, it is necessary to ensure communications security in a WSN. However, the useof the security protocols adds to the associated overhead. Therefore, ensuring communications securityin a WSN is a challenge. We believe that since the core component of any security protocol is the cipherused therein; the overhead due to a security protocol can be largely reduced, by employing essentiallya lightweight cipher. But at the same time, the cipher so employed must ensure appropriate levels ofsecurity with standard key-sizes. Currently, Skipjack (80-bit key-size) is the cipher of choice, for thesoftware based security protocols like TinySec, SenSec and MiniSec, used in WSNs. However, withthe help of exhaustive simulation, experiments and analysis, in this paper, we show that our optimizedimplementation of the Corrected Block Tiny Encryption Algorithm (XXTEA) (128-bit key-size), can bea good alternative to Skipjack; at least in the resource constrained WSN environments