Design and Analysis of Light Weight Block Cipher for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

The wireless body area network has developed into a new technology that is prominent for improving health care techniques.The wireless body area network consists of tiny wearable sensors that collect the important health parameters of the patients and communicate within them and to medical servers. The technology has proven to be very effective for monitoring patient’s health continuously and conveniently minimizing the visits for medical personnel.The confidentiality of patient’s medical data is to be protected and it is an important concern because many challenges coming from low resources in the wireless body area network environment.

In this thesis , ten of the popular symmetric ciphers, some of them being traditional block ciphers and some of them being commonly used in light weight encryption applications have been studied .The ciphers have been evaluated for their energy efficiency. A block cipher is
proposed which is based on SPN (substitution-permutation network).The energy efficiency of the proposed cipher is compared with the ciphers that have been surveyed and observed to be efficient in terms of energy.