Key dependent cipher scheme for sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a promising future for many commercial and military applications. WSN is vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks (active and passive). The confidentiality of WSN is an essential service and becoming a major concern for security WSN protocol designers. However, the characteristics of WSN (limitations of power, computation and memory) impose security challenges, since the conventional ciphers suffer from these limitations. In this paper, a new different cipher technique is defined to ensure the data confidentiality with a significant reduction of computational complexity, energy cost, and communication overhead. The proposed cipher is applied on a set of packets called generation. The strength of the proposed cipher against attacks is based on its dynamic property. The basic scheme was tested and evaluated by comparing it with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, which is considered as a reliable and robust cipher algorithm. Theoretical and simulation results of the proposed cipher scheme show that it is immune against linear, differential, chosen/known-plain-text, brute force, and statistical attacks.