A light weight FFT based enciphering system for extending the lifetime of mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Message security is most imperative in mobile ad hoc networks because of the applications in circumstances such as, disaster rescue, crisis management and military. Yet, due to the absence of a fixed framework and no centralized administration implementation of security is a testing prospect. Also certain attention must be paid to energy utilization constraints while designing a security mechanism for a mobile ad hoc network. This paper presents a method which considers aforementioned constraints and suggests a non-interactive light weight symmetric key cryptosystem using fast Fourier transform based hashing and generalised symbol table based polyalphabetic substitution. The key computation and secure hashing mechanism strengthen the proposed technique and is proved to be resilient enough against the non-legitimate users with less overhead to participating nodes. The analysis on the proposed technique is performed on various sets of data with different sized network to comprehend the level of security achieved.