A light weight enhancement to RC4 based security for resource constrained wireless devices

Chetan Nanjunda Mathur, K. P. Subbalakshmi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

7 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) uses the 64 bit RC4 secret key stream cipher as its layer 2 security pro- tocol. Although the underlying RC4 cipher is secure, the potential reuse of the same key stream by different frames is a weakness in the WEP. One enhancement to WEP is the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), which acts as a wrapper to the WEP protocol and uses a 128 bit RC4 encryption to eliminate the possibility of key reuse within a given session. However, TKIP cannot be gain- fully employed in devices where the 64 bit RC4 encryp- tion is hardwired. Also, with 128 bit encryption TKIP can secure 1030 frames per session. Comparing this to the typical number of frames per session (500-1000), it is easy to see that the use of a 128 bit key causes unneces- sary drain of power. The Wifi Protected Access (WPA), uses a 128 bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) ci- pher in the Counter-Mode-CBC-MAC Protocol (CCMP). This protocol requires higher computational power than the TKIP and is only intended for devices which possess higher computational power and memory. In this paper, we propose a light weight enhancement to the 64 bit WEP, which provides significant improve- ment in security (measured as the number of frames se- curely transmitted before base key change) with small en- ergy and memory overhead. Moreover, our technique can be tailored to the specific needs of resource constrained environments to provide just the necessary level of secu- rity. We use the Intrinsyc CerfCube1 as a resource con- strained wireless device and measure the resource con- sumed by various wireless security protocols on this de- vice. From the experimental results we see that proposed LWE consumes about 62% less power compared to TKIP and 99% less power compared CCMP (AES), while pro-viding a security enhancement of 232 over the WEP pro- tocol. These results demonstrate the utility of LWE as a good security protocol for wireless networks with battery power constrained devices and systems where 64 bit WEP is hardwired.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)205-212
Number of pages8
JournalInternational Journal of Network Security
Volume5
Issue number2
StatePublished - 2007

Keywords

  • Light weight cryptography
  • RC4
  • Stream ci-pher
  • TKIP
  • WEP
  • Wireless security

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