Implementation of Toeplitz Hash based RC-4 in WSN

Abstract

Certain Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications such as military and e-health care require the inter-node communication to be secure. The tiny WSN nodes have limited computational power, memory and finite energy source. These constraints restrict the implementation of highly secure models on the devices as they demand more memory and involve compute intensive operations. Several protocols have been designed for providing different security levels with varying strengths at the expense of the amount of hardware and computational power of the processor in the WSN node. In wireless equivalent privacy (WEP) model static keys are generated for the XOR operation with the plain text in the encryption process. This work proposes a new security model that provides dynamic keys to the encryption/decryption stages. A model for the proposed scheme has been developed using nesC and the same has been implemented on a IRIS WSN node. The WSN implementation of the proposed security model has been compared with those of WEP, WiFi Protected access (WPA) based on memory usage and execution time.