A Lightweight Encryption Algorithm to Enhance Wireless Sensor Network Security on the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an anticipated future technology that promises to connect a massive number of devices over the internet. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are regarded as one of the most essential subnetworks of the IoT. Sensor networks are being utilized by IoT to gather, monitor, and send sensitive data across wireless networks. Because the information transferred through WSNs is easily exposed to cyber-attacks, data security is critical. In WSNs, the attacker's adversary aims are to deteriorate and halt the network's effective use, as well as to interrupt network services, rendering them unreachable to the users or providing a user with false feedback. Since the users don’t have control over their data transmitted on the wireless medium or stored in the middleware, anyone with internet access can access it. This puts data confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity at risk since users with unauthorized access can easily access, alter, and manipulate data in transit. The proposed Lightweight Security Algorithm (LSA) is a hybrid algorithm created by combining the Security Protocol for Sensor Networks (SPINS) with the Secure IoT (SIT) encryption technique to improve WSN’s data security while lowering the threshold of attacks and minimize power consumption in WSNs without impacting network performance. Furthermore, the proposed LSA reduces the key generation time by 102mS thus improving the security by 99%. During data transmission, the power consumption is reduced by an average of 411.2uJ and the Packet Drop Ratio (PDR) is between 90 and 99% when comparing it with SPN and Feistel techniques.