  Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are memory and bandwidth limited networks
whose main goals are to maximize the network lifetime and minimize the energy
consumption and transmission cost. To achieve these goals, dif ferent
techniques of compression and clustering have been used. However, security is
an open and major issue in WSNs for which different approaches are used, both
in centralized and distributed WSNs' environments. This paper presents an
adaptive cryptographic scheme for secure transmission of various sensitive
parameters, sensed by wireless sensors to the fusion center for further
processing in WSNs such as military networks. The proposed method encrypts the
sensitive captured data of sensor nodes using various encryption procedures
(bitxor operation, bits shuffling, and secret key based encryption) and then
sends it to the fusion center. At the fusion center, the received encrypted
data is decrypted for taking further necessary actions. The experimental
results with complexity analysis, validate the effectiveness and feasibility of
the proposed method in terms of security in WSNs.
