Robust stream-cipher mode of authenticated encryption for secure communication in wireless sensor network

Authenticated Encryption is a cryptographic process of providing confidentiality and integrity protection of messages in a single pass without any support of conventional checksum, Message Authentication Code (MAC), or hash function. In this paper, at first, we show that how to construct the stream-cipher-based Authenticated Encryption environment, where the key-stream is generated from any secure block algorithm like Advanced Encryption Standard. In order to do that, we introduce two stream-cipher modes of Authenticated Encryption, namely, PFC-CTR (Counter-based Authenticated Encryption environment) and PFC-OCB (OCB-based Authenticated Encryption environment), which are quite robust against several active attacks, for example, message stream modification attacks, known-plain-text attacks, and chosen-plain-text attacks, and at the same time, they can also efficiently deal with some other issues like limited error propagation existing in several conventional stream-cipher modes of operation like Cipher Feedback, Output Feedback, and Counter. Finally, we enforce the concept of Authenticated Encryption in the sense of data communication security of the wireless sensor network (WSN), Global Mobility Networks (GLOMONET), and Cloud Computing environment, where only encryption can guarantee both the privacy and integrity in a single pass with the assurance of reasonable computational overhead. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.