Use of LFSR for Sensor Network Security: A New Approach

One of the widely used security mechanism for sensor network is the software-hardware implementation of cryptographic algorithms. If the confidential data is lost as a result of adversary effect, then the whole sensor network is prone to get exposed to the intruder. What we need is a strong mechanism, to protect such sensitive data. In this paper we present a technique where we mask all the intermediate input and output data with some values in order to de-correlate information leaked, if any, so that the original/actual information is not exposed to the attacker. An architecture is proposed which is embedded on the sensor node to incorporate built in security feature at the chip level itself. This is done by the addition of a new hardware component called an LFSR, at the chip level itself, which is capable of generating random numbers to mask the output. As far as the clustering technique used is concerned, we've considered the hierarchical clustering to ease data aggregation.