Lightweight IBE scheme for Wireless Sensor nodes

Abstract

Application of cryptography for secure Wireless Sensor Networks poses challenging problems because all the cryptographic algorithms are computationally intensive and wireless nodes have limited resources. In this paper, we describe an Identity Based Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (IBE-ECC) based on Tate pairing which is lightweight without any Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and no key exchanges. In addition, we propose a novel lightweight IBE-ECC scheme in which encryption is performed with no Tate pairing (computationally intensive) and is used only in decryption. This scheme is relevant for wireless nodes and in particular for Internet of Things (IoT) framework, wherein the wireless nodes do only message encryption, whereas the decryption is delegated to centralized servers or Gateways. We have also implemented our proposed scheme on a mobile phone with android platform for performance analysis. We observed that our proposed IBE-ECC scheme outperforms the existing IBE scheme in terms of complexity and efficiency of operation. Further, our scheme is based on super singular elliptic curves E/GF(p) where p is a special prime of the form Crandall primes. For such primes modular reduction can be implemented efficiently fast using Mohan-Adiga algorithm.