Low-Power Security Modules Optimized for WSNs

A crucial factor in numerous Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the security they provide. A promising approach for providing high-levels of security at a low energy cost is the low-power reconfigurable Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs). This paper presents a pioneering WSN platform which embeds a CPLD in a standard WSN node. This platform, as our realworld experiments demonstrate, accelerates one of the most widely used authentication algorithms by more than 3000 times. Moreover, the proposed system can accelerate by three orders of magnitude the header checksum calculation scheme that needs high processing power. At the same time the overall energy consumption of the new node is reduced up to to 98%, when compared with the consumption of a standard CPU-based WSN node executing those security algorithms in software.