HLDCA-WSN: Homomorphic Lightweight Data Confidentiality Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has become more and more important in many applications especially those required a high level of security such as: commercial, military and telemedicine applications. However, security in WSN suffers from several kinds of attacks (ranging between passive and active attacks). Eavesdropping attack remains the most powerful attack, since it has the capability to compromise the confidentiality of the whole packet content. In this context, several solutions and techniques have been presented in the literature, to ensure a secure transmission of packets in a large scale WSN. Unfortunately, many of these solutions failed to meet the main characteristics of WSN (limited energy consumption, low power, large bandwidth), and are considered as not efficient candidates to deal with tiny devices. For this reason, a novel homomorphic lightweight security scheme HLDCA-WSN based on dynamic permutation layer that is performed on a set of packets (denoted by generation) is proposed and discussed in this paper. HLDCA-WSN scheme overcomes passive attacks and ensures a significant reduction of computational complexity, energy cost, and communication overhead. Moreover, the dynamic property of the proposed scheme adds more robustness against traditional and physical attacks. The efficiency of the HLDCA ciphering scheme is demonstrated by an extensive security analysis and simulation results.