Achieving data security in wireless sensor networks using ultra encryption standard version — IV algorithm

Nowadays wireless networks are fast, becoming more secure than their wired counterparts. Recent technological advances in wireless networking, IC fabrication and sensor technology have lead to the emergence of millimetre scale devices that collectively form a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and are radically changing the way in which we sense, process and transport signals of interest. They are increasingly become viable solutions to many challenging problems and will successively be deployed in many areas in the future such as in environmental monitoring, business, and military applications. However, deploying new technology, without security in mind has often proved to be unreasonably dangerous. This also applies to WSNs, especially those used in applications that monitor sensitive information (e.g., health care applications). There have been significant contributions to overcome many weaknesses in sensor networks like coverage problems, lack in power and making best use of limited network bandwidth, however; work in sensor network security is still in its infancy stage. Security in WSNs presents several well-known challenges stemming from all kinds of resource constraints of individual sensors. The problem of securing these networks emerges more and more as a hot topic. Symmetric key cryptography is commonly seen as infeasible and public key cryptography has its own key distribution problem. In contrast to this prejudice, this paper presents a new symmetric encryption standard algorithm which is an extension of the previous work of the authors i.e. UES version-II and III. Roy et al recently developed few efficient encryption methods such as UES version-I, Modified UES-I, UES version-II, UES version-III. The algorithm is named as Ultra Encryption Standard version - IV algorithm. It is a Symmetric key Cryptosystem which includes multiple encryption, bit-wise reshuffling method and bit-wise columnar transposition method. In the present work the authors have performed the encryption process at the bit-level to achieve greater strength of encryption. The proposed method i.e. UES-IV can be used to encrypt short message, password or any confidential key.