A novel compound chaotic block cipher for wireless sensor networks

•This paper proposes a block cipher for wireless sensor network based on compound chaotic map.•The algorithm adopts Feistel network and constructs a Cubic function and its key space is larger.•The tests of security and performance show that the algorithm has high security.•Comparisons with other algorithms show the system has more efficiency and low resource depletion. The nodes of wireless sensor network (WSN) have limited calculation and communication ability. Traditional encryption algorithms need large amounts of resources, so they cannot be applied to the wireless sensor network. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a block cipher algorithm for wireless sensor network based on compound chaotic map. The algorithm adopts Feistel network and constructs a Cubic function including discretized chaotic map, and its key is generated by the compound chaotic sequence. Security and performance tests show that the algorithm has high security and efficiency, low resource depletion. So the novel chaotic algorithm is suitable for the wireless sensor networks.