Design and implementation of efficient reconfigurable cipher algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) networks are increasingly utilized in highly demanding scenarios such as medical applications. In such cases hardware designs emerge as a prominent approach to address processing demanding tasks offering significant advantages over respective software based solutions. In such cases reconfiguration capabilities enable the achievement of critical trade-off between adequate performance and resource conservation. In this context the main contribution of this paper is the proposal and performance evaluation of a reconfigurable encryption module with respect to the encryption key size aiming towards WSN utilization. Performance will be presented with respect to encryption process delay, reconfiguration delay and power consumption projecting to energy expenditure.