Survey and Benchmark of Stream Ciphers for Wireless Sensor Networks

For security applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), choosing best algorithms in terms of energy-efficiency and of small-storage requirements is a real challenge because the sensor networks must be autonomous. In [22], the authors have benchmarked on a dedicated platform some block-ciphers using several modes of operations and have deduced the best block cipher to use in the context of WSNs. This article proposes to study on a dedicated platform of sensors some stream ciphers. First, we sum-up the security provided by the chosen stream ciphers (especially the ones dedicated to software uses recently proposed in the European Project Ecrypt, workpackage eStream [27]) and presents some implementation tests performed on the platform [16].