Survey and Benchmark of Block Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

Survey and Benchmark of Block Ciphers forWireless Sensor NetworksYee Wei Law, Jeroen Doumen and Pieter HartelFaculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer ScienceUniversity of Twente, The Netherlands{ywlaw, doumen, pieter}@cs.utwente.nlAbstract. Choosingthe most storage- and energy-e cient block cipherspeci callyforwirelesssensornetworks(WSNs)isnotasstraightforwardas it seems. To our knowledge so far, there is no systematic evaluationframework for the purpose. In this paper, we have identi ed the can-didates of block ciphers suitable for WSNs based on existing literature.Forevaluatingandassessingthesecandidates,wehavedevisedasystem-atic framework that not only considers the security properties but alsothe storage- and energy-e cency of the candidates. Finally, based onthe evaluation results, we have selected the suitable ciphers for WSNs,namely Rijndael for high security and energy e ciency requirements;and MISTY1 for good storage and energy e ciency.1 IntroductionA wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network comprised of a large number ofsensors that (1) are physically small, (2) communicate wirelessly among eachother, and (3) are deployed without prior knowledge of the network topology.Due to the limitation of their physical size, the sensors tend to have storagespace, energy supply and communication bandwidth so limited that every pos-sible means of reducing the usage of these resources is aggressively sought. Forexample, a sensor ...