Towards Genetic Cryptography for Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks Gateways

The integration of wireless sensor networks into Internet of things, led to a new generation of sensor nodes, directly connected to remote servers, for signal processing and decision making. The migration of data processing from the local node, achieved by decoupling the node hardware from the required processing capabilities, is only possible through implementation of network virtualization. The virtualization which brings new services that are executed remotely has led to security challenges, yet to be resolved, due to the increasing amount of data being continually exchanged between the sensor node hub and remote servers. In this regard, we introduce a novel genetic algorithm for data security with a powerful security architecture that performs one-time key, single block enciphering instead of a block chaining or weak stream enciphering. The algorithm architecture produces variable (stealthy) keys and data that adopt the white noise statistical behavior, therefore, having high immunity to cryptanalysis. The algorithm combines gene fusion and horizontal gene transfer inspired from the spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A salt extracted from the data block hash value adds the stealthy-key feature to the cipher. In fact, the avalanche effect for a block of encrypted sensors data of 16 × 16 B achieves an average of 98% with a single bit flipped in the data. An application in biomedical WSN/IoT with simulation and experimental results is presented.