Performance Evaluation of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

With the increased use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in military, health monitoring, commercial, and home environments, developing a strong and durable security architecture ensuring confidentiality, integrity and authentication becomes necessary. The well-known traditional cryptosystems cannot be simply transferred to WSNs and must be modified to adapt them to the specific characteristics of WSNs.This paper shows a performance evaluation of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography in WSNs using encryption time, key size and energy consumption as evaluation criteria.