Implementation of ECDSA in WSN

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN's) have been finding their application in diversified fields. Certain WSN applications used in military and commercial fields require the data communication within the network to be secure and confidentiality of the data needs to be maintained. Any WSN security model requires key services, authentication and integrity. As WSN nodes are resource constrained, in terms of limited battery energy and less CPU capabilities, energy efficient crypto-algorithms need to be chosen. Elliptic curve (EC) based algorithms have proven to be computationally efficient and provide the same security level when compared with traditional crypto-algorithms for the given key size. This work provides implementation details of ECDSA, making use of the low-cost SHA-1. The WSN implementation of SHA-1 involves 8-bit operations as the IRIS node supports an 8- bit micro-controller. The SHA-1 and ECDSA algorithms have been implemented using IRIS WSN node.