An Empirical Study of Elliptic Curve Cryptography for the Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Development in Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS), Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and Wireless Communication has opened a new domain in networking arena called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). WSN is a special case of a Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) in which information is gathered, processed and communicated with the help of tiny wireless nodes that are deployed in the field where ordinary networks are unreachable for various environmental and strategic reasons. Wireless sensor nodes uses radio frequencies as a communications medium, and are vulnerable to active and passive attacks from adversaries including node capturing, frequency jamming, and a Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. Most of the research is going on to make WSN secure with Symmetric Key protocols but at the same time Public Key Cryptography (PKC) has received very little attention from researchers.

PKC is based on hardness of a mathematical problem like ‘factoring’ the product of two large primes which is used in Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) algorithm or computing ‘discreet logarithm’ used in Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). As compared to RSA, ECC offers same security level but with significantly smaller key size and is the potential candidate in the near future for WSN security. For example, a 160-bit ECC key provides the same level of security as a 1024-bit RSA key, and a 224-bit ECC key provides the same security as a 2048- bit RSA key. Smaller keys in WSN mean faster computation, lower power consumption, and memory and bandwidth savings of sensor node.

Detailed analysis and mathematical modeling of ECC have been investigated in this thesis with special reference to the WSN. Use of mixed and projective coordinate system, recoding of integer with One’s Complement Subtraction (OCS) method, splitting of integer to avoid

Special Power Analysis (SPA) attack, use of Elastic Window method to avoid node failure and use of Hidden generator point to avoid man in the middle attack for WSN have been proposed. These five innovative, novel and industrial applicable algorithms will remarkably improve performance of scalar multiplication process on WSN and will achieve node authenticity, data integrity, confidentiality, and freshness on 8 bit microcontroller of sensor node having limited resources and computational power. They will also provide better flexibility to the node and clean security interface in the WSN architecture. To validate our claims, simulation results obtained on MIRACL crypto library and MATLAB have been provided wherever necessary.