Secure Force: A low-complexity cryptographic algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Since devices in the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are usually small in size, resource constraint is one of the critical issues that needs to be taken into consideration. In this paper, a low-complexity symmetric cryptographic algorithm, denoted as Secure Force (SF), is proposed. It is developed based on the Feistel structure, and the encryption part can be implemented by using a simple architecture that only consists of basic mathematical operations (AND, OR, XOR, XNOR, shifting, swapping). This can help to reduce the burden on encoder, because the more complex key expansion process is only carried out at the decoder. Besides confusion and diffusion of data, different substitution and permutation techniques are also included to complex the cipher. The proposed algorithm is also compared to several existing algorithms in terms of architecture, flexibility, and security.