Securing Wireless Sensor Networks Using Cryptographic Functions

Public key cryptography is widely used for the purpose of confidential key exchange and authentication. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) however are a class of devices with very low computation power and cannot use public key cryptography feasibly. We provide a scheme which updates messages to the nodes as well as secure them using only symmetric cryptography and cryptographic hash functions. The scheme is low on computation; power and bandwidth requirements compared to public key based cryptographic primitives and as such can be used feasibly in any WSN. We implement this scheme in Deluge, a popular network programming protocol. In addition we simulate our scheme in TOSSIM and provide a performance evaluation of our scheme based on power consumption and end to end latency.