A lightweight block cipher based on a multiple recursive generator for wireless sensor networks and RFID

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, we use a multiple recursive generator (MRG) to generate sequences of numbers with very long periods, i.e., pseudo‐random sequences. The MRG effectively constructs a block cipher which satisfies important quality requirements such as security, long period, randomness, and efficiency. We compare our approach with another lightweight block cipher based on a linear congruential generator (LCG) and analyze the efficiency in terms of the number of basic operations that are being performed. We also study the effects of using special classes of MRG which hold certain portability and efficiency properties, and analyze their advantages in this context. The proposed cipher is a lightweight cipher, which is very useful for resource limited resources such as sensor nodes in sensor networks, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, etc. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.