Implementation and analysis of new lightweight cryptographic algorithm suitable for wireless sensor networks

Sensor devices have critical resource constraints such as processing speed, memory size and energy supply. Especially, energy consumption affects the network lifetime so that energy efficiency is an important requirement for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It means that it is a considerable matter to choose the energy- and memory-efficient cryptographic algorithm suitable for wireless sensor networks. TinySec, de facto security architecture for wireless sensor networks, supports traditional cryptographic algorithms such as RC5 and Skipjack while the traditional cryptographic algorithms might be unsuitable for 8-bit computing devices of which wireless sensor networks consist. Accordingly, it is necessary to evaluate the traditional cryptographic algorithms and 8-bit oriented cryptographic algorithm in performance but there is no work in this area. In this paper, we consider another candidate HIGHT, designed to be proper to ubiquitous 8-bit computing devices (e.g. sensor node or RFID tag), for wireless sensor networks. After implementing new lightweight HIGHT on Mica2 and analyzing the performance between HIGHT and the traditional cryptographic algorithms, we can conclude that HIGHT, outstanding in security and efficiency, is recommended for TinySec as like traditional cryptographic algorithms on TinySec. Hence, we recommend new lightweight candidate HIGHT to be added to security module in TinySec.