Energy-efficient multiplication method for ECC in WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN’s)are highly resource constrained and require energy efficient and strong cryptographic techniques to ensure secure connectivity. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a very popular public key cryptography technique due to the extremely complex and difficult Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), it relies upon. In this paper, a technique for speeding up point multiplication, a fundamental operation involved in ECC, is presented. Specifically, the computation cost of the width−w Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) method of point multiplication is drastically reduced by employing a mixed coordinate system to perform the basic point doubling and addition operations. This paper demonstrates that this technique results in a reduction of about 62% in the number of field multiplications required when compared to the traditional techniques for elliptic curve point multiplication