Public key cryptography in resource-constrained WSN

In this paper we present a detailed review of the works on public key cryptography (PKC) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the early days of sensor networks, public key cryptography was thought to be completely unfeasible considering its computational complexity and energy requirements. By this time, several works have proved that the lightweight versions of many well-known public key algorithms can be utilized in WSN environment. With the expense of a little energy, public key based schemes could in fact be the best choice for ensuring data security in high-security demanding WSN applications. Here, we talk about the notion of public key cryptography in WSN, its applicability, challenges in its implementation, and present a detailed study of the significant works on PKC in WSN

Elliptic curve and pseudo-inverse matrix based cryptosystem for wireless sensor networks

Applying asymmetric key security to wireless sensor network (WSN) has been challenging task for the researcher of this field. One common trade-off is that asymmetric key architecture does provide good enough security than symmetric key but on the other hand, sensor network has some resource limitations to implement asymmetric key approach. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has significant advantages than other asymmetric key system like RSA, D-H etc. The most important feature of ECC is that it has much less bit requirement and at the same time, ensures better security compared to others. Hence, ECC can be a better option for implementing asymmetric key approach for sensor network. We propose a new cryptosystem which is based on Pseudo-inverse matrix and Elliptic Curve Cryptography. We establish a relationship between these two different concepts and evaluate our proposed system on the basis of the results of similar works as well as our own simulation done in TinyOS environment

Security wireless sensor networks: prospects, challenges, and future

With the advancements of networking technologies and miniaturization of electronic devices, wireless sensor network (WSN) has become an emerging area of research in academic, industrial, and defense sectors. Different types of sensing technologies combined with processing power and wireless communication capability make sensor networks very lucrative for their abundant use in near future. However, many issues are yet to be solved before their full-scale practical implementations. Among all the research issues in WSN, security is one of the most challenging topics to deal with. The major hurdle of securing a WSN is imposed by the limited resources of the sensors participating in the network. Again, the reliance on wireless communication technology opens the door for various types of security threats and attacks. Considering the special features of this type of network, in this chapter we address the critical security issues in wireless sensor networks. We talk about cryptography, steganography, and other basics of network security and their applicability in WSN. We explore various types of threats and attacks against wireless sensor networks, possible countermeasures, mentionable works done so far, other research issues, etc. We also introduce the view of holistic security and future trends towards research in wireless sensor network security

The Energy Cost of Cryptographic Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor nodes generally face serious limitations in terms of computational power, energy supply, and network bandwidth. Therefore, the implementation of effective and secure techniques for setting up a shared secret key between sensor nodes is a challenging task. In this paper we analyze and compare the energy cost of two different protocols for authenticated key establishment. The first protocol employs a lightweight variant of the Kerberos key transport mechanism with 128-bit AES encryption. The second protocol is based on ECMQV, an authenticated version of the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and uses a 256-bit prime field GF(p) as underlying algebraic structure. We evaluate the energy cost of both protocols on a Rockwell WINS node equipped with a 133 MHz StrongARM processor and a 100 kbit/s radio module. The evaluation considers both the processor’s energy consumption for calculating cryptographic primitives and the energy cost of radio communication for different transmit power levels. Our simulation results show that the ECMQV key exchange consumes up to twice as much energy as Kerberos-like key transport