A Lightweight White-Box Symmetric Encryption Algorithm against Node Capture for WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments and, thus, nodes can be potentially captured by an adversary. This is a typical white-box attack context, i.e., the adversary may have total visibility of the implementation of the build-in cryptosystem and full control over...

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Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 15; no. 5; pp. 11928 - 11952
Main Authors: Shi, Yang, Wei, Wujing, He, Zongjian
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 21.05.2015
MDPI
Subjects:
Algorithms
Encryption
Lightweight
Mathematical models
node capture
Remote sensors
Security
Sensors
Software
symmetric encryption algorithms
Weight reduction
white-box attack contexts
Wireless networks
wireless sensor networks
symmetric encryption algorithms
white-box attack contexts
wireless sensor networks
node capture
ISSN:1424-8220, 1424-8220
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments and, thus, nodes can be potentially captured by an adversary. This is a typical white-box attack context, i.e., the adversary may have total visibility of the implementation of the build-in cryptosystem and full control over its execution platform. Handling white-box attacks in a WSN scenario is a challenging task. Existing encryption algorithms for white-box attack contexts require large memory footprint and, hence, are not applicable for wireless sensor networks scenarios. As a countermeasure against the threat in this context, in this paper, we propose a class of lightweight secure implementations of the symmetric encryption algorithm SMS4. The basic idea of our approach is to merge several steps of the round function of SMS4 into table lookups, blended by randomly generated mixing bijections. Therefore, the size of the implementations are significantly reduced while keeping the same security efficiency. The security and efficiency of the proposed solutions are theoretically analyzed. Evaluation shows our solutions satisfy the requirement of sensor nodes in terms of limited memory size and low computational costs.
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This paper is an extended version of the paper entitled “A Lightweight White-box Symmetric Encryption Algorithm against Node Capture for WSNs”, presented at IEEE WCNC 2014, Istanbul, Turkey, 6–9 April 2014.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s150511928