ECC with hidden generator point in WSNs

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), comprising of tiny nodes with limited energy, computational and communication resources, are being widely used in various application areas ranging from pollution and weather monitoring to military. Even though every application may not require data to be exchanged in a secure manner, few WSN applications may have certain security requirements. The data is encrypted by a sender and sent over the wireless links and the same is decrypted at the receiver. To meet this purpose, symmetric key cryptographic (SKC) algorithms may be used. Such SKC primitives require keys to be made available before carrying out the data transfer between the nodes. Alternately, Public Key Cryptographic techniques, such as RSA algorithm can be considered. Even though, RSA is a popular algorithm providing good security level, it is computationally intensive involving large key sizes. The RSA can not be used in WSNs, as the nodes have limited resources. Presently, it is infeasible to implement the RSA algorithm using any of the WSN nodes commercially available. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), another public key cryptographic (PKC) algorithm providing same level of security with smaller key size requirements, can be used as an alternative in order to provide security in WSN applications. ECC encryption and decryption use domain parameters, which includes the Generator point to be published. In most of the outdoor WSN applications, the deployment of the nodes is random and the nodes could be captured and an attacker could launch man-in-middle (MIM) attack, and break the public key thereby leading to security breach in the network. A technique to overcome such an attack is proposed in this work and the same is compared with two other similar approaches.