Efficient data encryption technique using quaternions for wireless sensor network

Abstract

Security in a wireless sensor network is an essential requirement to safeguard the system from misuse of the collected data. In a wireless sensor network, the sensed data is to be transmitted to a base station securely and safely. In this process, data packets may route through multiple sensor nodes and reached the base station at the end. The encryption is the basic tool to protect data from vulnerable attacks in a wireless sensor network. Among the two basic encryption classes namely symmetric key encryption and asymmetric key encryption, the prior is most suitable for wireless sensor network for its simplicity and low computation cost. In this article, we propose a quaternion based encryption system applicable to the wireless sensor network with a key distribution scheme. We use the IEEE standard half-precision number system in the arrangement of special quaternions and secret keys. The quaternion encryption mainly rotates one quaternion w.r.t. an axis with a given angle and thereby produce a new quaternion. Experimental results for the encryption and decryption process and its efficiency is discussed in this article.