MCPSC: Memory conservation protocol for secure communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being used everywhere around us whether it be a smart office or an application related to environmental monitoring, healthcare, surveillance, education and training. Most of the time such application domains involve handling of sensitive data that would require secure dissemination of information from sensor node to the data collection point (target node). However, scarcity of memory, battery life and computational power has always posed a serious challenge to ensure secure communication in such versatile application domains. In this paper we have proposed an algorithm that establishes secure communication in WSNs with memory conservation. Our proposed algorithm divides the sensor nodes into two groups, strong nodes and weak nodes based on their memory capacity. The algorithm itself utilizes a hybrid cryptosystem; combination of public and private key cryptography, where the exchange of an encrypted symmetric key is done using public key cryptography.