Sensors 2015, 15, 11928-11952; doi:10.3390/s150511928 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors Article A Lightweight White-Box Symmetric Encryption Algorithm † against Node Capture for WSNs Yang Shi, Wujing Wei and Zongjian He * School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, No.4800 Cao’An Highway, Shanghai 201804, China; E-Mails:
[email protected] (Y.S.);
[email protected] (W.W.) † This paper is an extended version of the paper entitled “A Lightweight White-box Symmetric Encryption Algorithm against Node Capture for WSNs”, presented at IEEE WCNC 2014, Istanbul, Turkey, 6–9 April 2014. * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel./Fax: +86-21-6958-9840. Academic Editor: Leonhard M. Reindl Received: 26 February 2015 / Accepted: 8 May 2015 / Published: 21 May 2015 Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments and, thus, nodes can be potentially captured by an adversary. This is a typical white-box attack context, i.e., the adversary may have total visibility of the implementation of the build-in cryptosystem and full control over its execution platform. Handling white-box attacks in a WSN scenario is a challenging task. Existing encryption algorithms for white-box attack contexts require large memory footprint and, hence, are not applicable for wireless sensor networks scenarios. As a countermeasure against the threat in this context, in this paper, we propose a class of lightweight secure implementations of the symmetric encryption algorithm SMS4. The basic idea of our approach is to merge several steps of the round function of SMS4 into table lookups, blended by randomly generated mixing bijections.