Secure Communication for 6TiSCH Wireless Networks Based on Hybrid ECC and AES Algorithms

Abstract

The 6TiSCH protocol stack has been widely utilized in the industry to build highly reliable and energy efficiency wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The communication security between nodes mainly relies on the AES encryption algorithm, but the 6TiSCH protocol does not regulate the protection strategy for encryption keys in the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid ECC-AES data encryption scheme based on the 6TiSCH protocol stack. The Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH), Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone (ECQV) algorithms are used to negotiate the shared key for each two nodes in a WSN, and AES encryption with dynamic session keys are derived from the shared key during the nodes’ communication phase. Meanwhile, since the ECC algorithm is used in the resource-constrained nodes, this paper considers the influence of the underlying elliptic curve operations on the computation speed of the shared key, and proposes a regular window algorithm to accelerate the scalar multiplication operation based on previous researches. To prove the scheme’s viability, we conduct simulation experiments on the generation time of shared keys, and the experimental results prove that the encryption scheme under the regular window scalar multiplication has an impressive key generation speed.