Paper 2007/204

Dragon-MAC: Securing Wireless Sensor Networks with Authenticated Encryption

Shu Yun Lim, Chuan Chin Pu, Hyo Taek Lim, and Hoon Jae Lee

Abstract

Sensor networks offer economically viable monitoring solutions for a wide variety of applications. In order to combat the security threats that sensor networks are exposed to, a cryptography protocol is implemented at sensor nodes for point-to-point encryption between nodes. Disclosure, disruption and deception threats can be defeated by authenticating data sources as well as encrypting data in transmission. Given that nodes have limited resources, symmetric cryptography that is proven to be efficient for low power devices is implemented. Data protection is integrated into a sensor's packet by the means of symmetric encryption with the Dragon stream cipher and incorporating the newly designed Dragon-MAC Message Authentication Code. The proposed algorithm was designed to employ some of the data already computed by the underlying Dragon stream cipher for the purpose of minimizing the computational cost of the operations required by the MAC algorithm. In view that Dragon is a word based stream cipher with a fast key stream generation, it is very suitable for a constrained environment. Our protocol regarded the entity authentication and message authentication through the implementation of authenticated encryption scheme in Telos B wireless sensor nodes.