Enhanced-AES encryption mechanism with S-box splitting for wireless sensor networks

The sensor networks have revolutionized wireless technology with next-generation internetworking and scalable infrastructure. Since, the autonomous sensor operates in vulnerable and unattended environmental conditions, hence, securing the sensed data becomes a critical issue. Advanced Encryption Standard popularly known as AES is one of the most common and extensively used algorithms for private key encryption in sensor networks. However, the substitution box lookup table is a time-consuming process in AES. Therefore, our research targets to improve the running time and throughput of AES by proposing a novel technique of splitting AES S-box followed with parallel substituting of two bytes at a time using multithreading. The proposed Enhanced-AES has the feasibility of implementation in the heterogeneous and hierarchical multicore sensor network. Energy consumption and execution time are the parameters used to evaluate the functioning of the Enhanced-AES. Our proposed model outperformed the existing security mechanisms; thereby increasing the lifetime of the sensor network and maintaining the data freshness. © 2021, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.