Enhancement of ZigBee and Wi-Fi security by a robust and fast chaotic algorithm

The security protocols used in ZigBee and Wi-Fi networks rely on stream cipher algorithms, like RC4 (Used in WEP and WPA) or AES-CTR (in WPA2), to encrypt data before transmission. RC4 is a fast algorithm, but represents some major flaws. AES is a very robust algorithm, but it is time consuming. For some industrial and medical applications, these algorithms don´t respect the real-time and robustness requirements at the same time. Therefore, new fast stream ciphers where proposed in the eStream project, but also these ciphers has shown some weaknesses. On the other hand, chaotic functions properties have encouraged their use in crypto-systems for data security. In this paper, a new chaotic encryption algorithm is presented, to be used for data encryption in some industrial and medical applications where robustness and real time are both essential. It is composed from two perturbed PWLCM chaotic maps. Then, to quantify the security level and rapidity of our proposed algorithm, we compare it to the eStream finalist candidates and to the AES-CTR algorithm.