Experimental Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Algorithms on Sensor Nodes

Many security solutions have been proposed in the domain of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Usually, all these approaches are based on well-known cryptographic algorithms. The efficiency of WSN not only depends on effective routing decisions or energy aware wireless communication. In contrast, the efficiency strongly depends on the application scenario that includes appropriate security mechanisms. Previously, only few approaches were analyzed in experimental setups. Therefore, only theoretical measures were applied to demonstrate and discuss the behavior of security solutions. In this paper, we used an experimental setup for the verification of runtime behavior of several cryptographic algorithms including MD5, SHA-1, and AES. We used typical sensor hardware to get reasonable results. Based on our experiments, we provide some analysis and considerations on practical feasibility of such cryptographic algorithms in sensor networks