Study of Wireless Authentication Center with Mixed Encryption in WSN

WSN (wireless sensor network) has been used in a wide range of applications nowadays. Sensor networks may often relay critical data; thus, security must be a high priority. However, due to their limited computational, energy, and storage resources, sensor nodes are vulnerable to attack. So how to protect sensor nodes from attacks without raising computational capability and energy consumption is a worthwhile issue. A WAC (wireless authentication center) with mixed encryption named MEWAC is proposed. MEWAC is based on MCU (Microcontroller Unit) and WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) module and uses RSA, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), and SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) to provide high performance authentication and data encryption services for sensor nodes. The experimental results show that MEWAC has the advantages of low cost, low power consumption, good performance, and stability; moreover, the authentication protocol improves the security of WSN and reduces the overhead in node authentication.