Increasing the reliability of security protocols for WSNs

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) contains several sensor nodes with very limited sources such as a small microcontroller and a battery. These features usually result in difficulties in employing most of the conventional wireless network protocols (e.g., security protocols) unfavorably. Research on especially increasing reliability of the WSNs employed in health applications recently receives a remarkable attention. In this paper, a reliable WSN security protocol abbreviated as HRWSP has been introduced. It smoothly combines the CTR (Counter Mode) and CBC-MAC (Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code) approaches with the well-known SEA (Scalable Encryption Algorithm) block encryption algorithm for increased data confidentiality and authentication & integrity. The security level of the HRWSP can be dynamically increased by employing these methods. The results lead to the main conclusion that using the HRWSP with the 96-bit data block/key size has a insignificant effect on the WSN node energy consumption that is increased about two times compared to that of the traditional TinySEC protocol while employing the HRWSP with the 192-bit data block/key size providing a reasonably high security level.