Applied Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

It is challenging to secure a wireless sensor network (WSN) because of its use of inexpensive sensor nodes of very limited processing capability, memory capacity, and battery life that preclude using traditional security solutions. Due to perceived excessive computational and architectural overhead, public key algorithms are altogether avoided for WSNs. Currently security in WSNs is provided using only symmetric key cryptography, but it requires keys to be embedded in sensor nodes before deployment and the entire network has to go through a key establishment phase after deployment. Accordingly, in this chapter, we summarize, discuss, and evaluate recent results reported in literature on sensor network security protocols such as for key establishment, random key pre-distribution, data confidentiality, and broadcast authentication. In addition, we discuss promising research results in public key cryptography for WSNs, particularly related to elliptic curve cryptography and its application for identity based encryption.