Security Analysis of Lightweight Encryption based on Advanced Encryption Standard for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very essential. However, because of the design of WSN devices with constrained resources; it is a challenge to develop and implement an encryption algorithm that is secure but will not consume much of the devices limited resources. This paper, presents a lightweight encryption based from Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) - LAES. In the proposed cipher, the MixColumns function of original AES is replaced by a 128-bit permutation to lessen the computational complexity of the algorithm and in order to reduce the resource utilization of the WSN node. During synthesis, results have shown that LAES have lesser device utilization as compared to recent implementation of traditional AES. The security of both LAES and AES were tested using the same sets of data to obtain the avalanche effect. Results have shown that on Plaintext bit flip, LAES obtained an average of 53.0469% which is 4.2969% higher than AES. On key bit flip, LAES obtained an average of 50.9375% which 3.4375% higher than AES. This shows that replacing MixColumns function with 128-bit permutation lessens the resource utilization in the hardware implementation of the encryption algorithm without compromising the security.