Rc5 Algorithm: Potential Cipher Solution for Security in Wireless Body Sensor Networks (Wbsn)

The patient-related data stored in the WBSN plays an important role in medical diagnosis and treatment; hence it is essential to ensure the security of these data. Access to patient-related data must be strictly limited only to authorized users; otherwise, the patient’s privacy could be abused. There has been very little study done in encryption algorithms suitable for WBSN. In this paper we focus on RC5 encryption algorithm as a potential cipher solution for providing data protection in WBSN. RC5 can be considered as one of the best ciphers in terms of overall performance, when used in nodes with limited memory and processing capabilities. In WBSN the size of data varies for different medical (health parameters such as ECG, EEG, Blood pressure, Blood Sugar etc) or nonmedical (video, audio etc) applications. RC5 is a highly efficient and flexible cryptographic algorithm, for which many parameters (key size, block size, number of rounds) can be adjusted to tradeoff security strength with power consumption and computational overhead. Thus RC5 with suitable parameters may perform well for WBSN applications with different data size. Implementations for WBSN nodes are in evolving stage now. This paper further presents a brief survey of various implementations of RC5 algorithm to convince its suitability for WBSN.

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