Low-Power Security Modules Optimized for WSNs

Abstract

A crucial factor in numerous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the security they provide. A promising approach for providing high-levels of security at a low energy cost is the low-power reconfigurable Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs). This paper presents a pioneering WSN platform which embeds a CPLD in a standard WSN node. This platform, as our realworld experiments demonstrate, accelerates one of the most widely used authentication algorithms by more than 3000 times. Moreover, the proposed system can accelerate by three orders of magnitude the header checksum calculation scheme that needs high processing power. At the same time the overall energy consumption of the new node is reduced up to to 98%, when compared with the consumption of a standard CPU-based WSN node executing those security algorithms in software.

Embedded Systems Security: A Survey of EU Research Efforts

“…Another approach to WSN node security is based on the use of low‐cost, low‐energy consumption Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs), which are programmable logic devices having a complexity between that of Programmable Logic Arrays and that of Field Programmable Gate Arrays, sharing architectural features with both. A WSN platform, which embeds a CPLD in a standard WSN node, is presented in . As real‐world experiments show, this CPLD‐equipped platform can increase the performance of a standard WSN node by a factor of 1220 to 3000 when executing certain algorithms and also reduce power consumption, with a reported reduction of up to 98%.…”

Analysis and composition of security primitives towards a framework that safeguards the confidentiality, integrity and availability of embedded systems

“…Another approach to WSN node security is based on the use of low cost, low energy consumption Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs), which are programmable logic devices having a complexity between that of Programmable Logic Arrays (PLAs) and that of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), sharing architectural features with both. A WSN platform which embeds a CPLD in a standard WSN node is presented in [258]. As real-world experiments show, this CPLD-equipped platform can increase the performance of a standard WSN node by a factor of 1220 to 3000 when executing certain algorithms and also reduce power consumption, with a reported reduction of up to 98%.…”