Two-phase hybrid cryptography algorithm for wireless sensor networks

For achieving security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), cryptography plays an important role. In this paper, a new security algorithm using combination of both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic techniques is proposed to provide high security with minimized key maintenance. It guarantees three cryptographic primitives, integrity, confidentiality and authentication. Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are combined to provide encryption. XOR-DUAL RSA algorithm is considered for authentication and Message Digest-5 (MD5) for integrity. The results show that the proposed hybrid algorithm gives better performance in terms of computation time, the size of cipher text, and the energy consumption in WSN. It is also robust against different types of attacks in the case of image encryption.