• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
• /
• v.18 no.5
• /
• pp.3-16
• /
• 2008

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN for short) is a wireless network consisting of distributed small devices which are called sensor nodes or motes. Recently, there has been an extensive research on WSN and also on its security. For secure storage and secure transmission of the sensed information, sensor nodes should be equipped with cryptographic algorithms. Moreover, these algorithms should be efficiently implemented since sensor nodes are highly resource-constrained devices. There are already some existing algorithms applicable to sensor nodes, including public key ciphers such as TinyECC and standard block ciphers such as AES. Stream ciphers, however, are still to be analyzed, since they were only recently standardized in the eSTREAM project. In this paper, we implement over the MicaZ platform nine software-based stream ciphers out of the ten in the second and final phases of the eSTREAM project, and we evaluate their performance. Especially, we apply several optimization techniques to six ciphers including SOSEMANUK, Salsa20 and Rabbit, which have survived after the final phase of the eSTREAM project. We also present the implementation results of hardware-oriented stream ciphers and AES-CFB fur reference. According to our experiment, the encryption speeds of these software-based stream ciphers are in the range of 31-406Kbps, thus most of these ciphers are fairly acceptable fur sensor nodes. In particular, the survivors, SOSEMANUK, Salsa20 and Rabbit, show the throughputs of 406Kbps, 176Kbps and 121Kbps using 70KB, 14KB and 22KB of ROM and 2811B, 799B and 755B of RAM, respectively. From the viewpoint of encryption speed, the performances of these ciphers are much better than that of the software-based AES, which shows the speed of 106Kbps.