Secure and efficient ECC speeding up algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in several applications ranging from environmental and health-care monitoring to military uses. Since sensor networks are typically deployed in hostile environments, broadcast authentication is a fundamental security service in wireless sensor networks. The slow signature verification in existing schemes always causes high energy consumption and long verification delay for broadcast authentication. In this paper, we study the secure and efficient ECC speeding up algorithms for fast authentication in wireless sensor networks. We propose two fast algorithms based on constrained triple base number system to improve the efficiency for situations with and without precomputations. These new algorithms combine the sparsity of constrained TBNS with Yao algorithm to reduce the cost of scalar multiplication. Several experiments have been conducted using Magma software to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms. Our experiments show that the two algorithms are more efficient than existing algorithms. Furthermore, the improvement of efficiency will reduce the energy consumption and thus prolong the network lifetime due to the decrease of computation overhead in signature verification.