An RC4 based Light Weight Secure Protocol for Sensor Networks

As sensor networks edge closer toward wide-spread deployment, security issues become a central concern. So far, the main research focus has been on making sensor networks feasible and useful, and less emphasis was placed on security. In this paper we present a new light weight secure protocol based on RC4 stream cipher. In addition, we construct an RC4 based one-way hash function, which can be used for key generation and data authentication. The proposed protocol is an idea for resource-constrained environments and wireless communication, and can be widely used in the applications of one-to-one secure communication as well as broadcasting and multicasting where the communication nodes have limited processing and storage capabilities.