LIGHT WEIGHT ONE WAY CRYPTOGRPHIC HASH ALGORITHM FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Abstract

Authentication of a message is a great research challenge in today’s advanced wire and wireless communication. Cryptographic hash functions are used to protect the authenticity of information. Some of the most popular and commonly used cryptographic hash algorithms are MD5 and SHA1. These hash algorithms are used in a wide variety of security applications e.g. securing node/message in traditional networks. However, the commonly used hash algorithms require huge computational overhead which is not affordable by applications in energy-starved network e.g. wireless sensor network (WSN). In these applications the major constraints are communication, computation and storage overheads; out of which communication and computation overheads consume high energy. Keeping this fact in mind, in this work, a light-weight, one-way, cryptographic hash algorithm is suggested with a target to produce a hash-digest with fixed and relatively small length for such an energy-starved wireless network. The primary focus is making the algorithm light-weight so that upon using it in application of network like WSN, the nodes can successfully run the algorithm with low energy. It is suggested that such algorithm must fulfill all the basic properties such as preimage resistance, collision resistance of a one-way hash function. The proposed algorithm is developed using NS2 simulation tool and results were compared with MD5 and SHA1.