A LCG-based Secure Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, based on a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG), we propose a new block cipher that is suitable for constructing a lightweight secure protocol for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. Based on the Plumstead's inference algorithm, we are motivated to embed the generated pseudo-random numbers with sensor data messages in order to provide security. Specifically, the security of our proposed cipher is achieved by adding random noise and random permutations to the original data messages. The analysis of our cipher indicates that it can satisfy the security requirements of wireless sensor networks. We demonstrate that secure protocols based on our proposed cipher satisfy the baseline security requirements: data confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity with low overhead. Performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed block cipher is more lightweight than RC5 in terms of the number of basic operations.