Energy efficient security architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

One of the primary goals in designing a smart home environment is to minimize energy consumption by efficient management of home appliances. Smart homes often employ wireless sensor networks (WSN) to monitor physical parameters (like light, temperature, or presence of users at home). There is a growing concern about protection of data acquired by easily accessible wireless sensors; on the other hand, smart home networking trend stresses the importance of further protecting the communication of acquired data. Public-key cryptography methods have been long considered as energy inefficient to be applied in constraint environments such as sensor networks. In this paper we revisit public-key data protection in WSN and design a fault tolerant security architecture based on the use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), whose primary goal is to maximize lifetime of sensor nodes. We propose the use of Java enabled, heterogenous and clustered WSN platform and discuss its advantages over existing solutions, which commonly imply heavy optimization of security code and procedures.