A Dynamic Light-Weight Symmetric Encryption Algorithm for Secure Data Transmission via BLE Beacons

Abstract

Pervasive sensing with Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) is a promising technology for continuous health monitoring. Since the sensor nodes are resource-limited, on-node processing and advertisement of digested information via BLE beacon is a promising technique that can enable a node gateway to communicate with more sensor nodes and extend the sensor node’s lifetime before requiring recharging. This study proposes a Dynamic Light-weight Symmetric (DLS) encryption algorithm designed and developed to address the challenges in data protection and real-time secure data transmission via message advertisement. The algorithm uses a unique temporal encryption key to encrypt each transmitting packet with a simple function such as XOR. With small additional overhead on computational resources, DLS can significantly enhance security over existing baseline encryption algorithms. To evaluate its performance, the algorithm was utilized on beacon data encryption over advertising channels. The experiments demonstrated the use of the DLS encryption algorithm on top of various light-weight symmetric encryption algorithms (i.e., TEA, XTEA, PRESENT) and a MD5 hash function. The experimental results show that DLS can achieve acceptable results for avalanche effect, key sensitivity, and randomness in ciphertexts with a marginal increase in the resource usage. The proposed DLS encryption algorithm is suitable for implementation at the application layer, is light and energy efficient, reduces/removes the need for secret key exchange between sensor nodes and the server, is applicable to dynamic message size, and also protects against attacks such as known plaintext attack, brute-force attack, replaying attack, and differential attack.