A survey: Lightweight cryptography in WSN

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a wireless network which contains small sensor nodes to monitor physical or environmental conditions. When WSNs are deployed in inaccessible areas, the probability of occurring different types of attacks is very high. So the security of WSN becomes extremely important. As sensors have limited processing power, limited storage, low bandwidth, and energy; traditional security measures designed for the resource-rich networks such as LAN etc. are not suitable for the resource-constrained WSN. In presence of such limitations it becomes mandatory to devise lightweight security solutions for data transmission in WSNs. Because of problems in public key cryptography such as costly key computation, longer keys, key vulnerability to brute force attack, key distribution and maintenance, etc., it is not preferred for WSN. The less computation and low memory requirements of symmetric key cryptography with very short length of key (lightweight) justifies its use in WSN to achieve information security. Hence, this paper aims to study, discuss and analyze the Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms Suitable for Wireless Sensor Networks.