EDCA: Efficient diffusion cipher and authentication scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

The security of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is essential for effective deployment in various areas and applications such as military and business. The existing security solutions of WSN are based on multi-round function, which requires high computing complexity and energy consumption. WSN have, however, limited resources that prevent their efficient deployment for a long period. In this paper, a new kind of security system based on a cipher and authentication algorithm called EDCA is presented to ensure the necessary security requirements with low computation complexity. Furthermore, the proposed cipher is based on a dynamic binary diffusion layer. The contents of packets is divided into many blocks, which are mixed together to produce the cipher blocks. Likewise, an enhanced version of cipher is presented to attain a better statistical properties. Additionally, EDCA is evaluated by comparing it with AES, which is considered reliable and robust in several standards of sensor networks. The results show that the proposed algorithm has a reduced computation complexity, and is robust and could be adopted for different types of wireless or mobile networks.