Design and Implementation of a Lightweight Encryption Scheme for Wireless Sensor Nodes

Abstract

For the Internet engineering society, Internet of Things (IoT) is a new prospect as it links embedded devices to the Internet Protocol (IP) based networks. One of the concept in IoT is 6LoWPAN, which enables Internet Protocol (IP) to be applied to the smallest devices. 6LoWPAN architecture is more popular and known for its architecture in the constrained environment. 6LoWPAN is used in many applications like wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where the nodes operating have limited capabilities in terms of power, memory and footprint area. Currently in the 6LoWPAN stack, the encryption algorithm used is AES-128/256 which is more power consumptive to do encryption on any given platform. Moreover, its hardware implementation as IP core will also result in higher Gate Equivalents (GE’s). This paper is all about replacing the encryption algorithm- Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128/256) used in 6LoWPAN with a new lightweight encryption design NUCLEAR, which focuses on making the 6LoWPAN stack more lightweight. The lightweight encryption design can also be implemented as IP core as it results in very fewer gate counts as compared to AES-128/256 or any other lightweight cipher designs. We have proposed a Generalized Feistel Structure (GFS) cipher NUCLEAR which is highly efficient in terms of memory requirements, power dissipation and footprint area. The proposed design NUCLEAR satisfy all the constraints posed by the resource-constrained environment like IoT.