Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) aim at linking the cyber and physical worlds. Their security has taken relevance due to the\nsensitive data these networks might process under unprotected physical and cybernetic environments.The operational constraints\nin the sensor nodes demand security primitives with small implementation size and low power consumption. Authenticated\nencryption is a mechanism to provide these systems with confidentiality, integrity, and authentication of sensitive data. In this\npaper we explore hardware implementation alternatives of authenticated encryption through generic compositions, to assess the\ncosts of this security approach in WSN. Two symmetric ciphers, AES and Present, and two hash functions, SHA and spongent,\nare used as the underlying primitives for the generic compositions. All the architectures studied in this work are implemented and\nevaluated in an FPGA-based WSN mote.The life time of the sensor node is used as the main evaluation metric but FPGA resources\nare also reported. From the experimental results obtained, it is shown how lightweight ciphers significantly contribute to reduce\nimplementation area and energy consumption overheads, extending the lifetime of the sensor node.
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