Fast elliptic curve point multiplication for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks facilitate real-time data processing in many applications such as intrusion detection and military surveillance. These applications inherently demand a high level of security. Public key cryptographic techniques such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) provide a flexible interface to ensure security, requiring no pre-distribution of keys. However, ECC is very compute-intensive, owing to the computationally complex elliptic curve point multiplication operation. This work presents a technique to speed up the elliptic curve point multiplication operation, achieving a cost reduction of about 48% over the double and add algorithm and about 40% over the width-w Non Adjacent Form (NAF) algorithm. Additionally, results of its software implementation are also presented, simulating the specifications of MEMSIC's wireless sensor network development kit. Finally, we conclude that the timing results obtained from the software implementation conform to the theoretical results.