Energy efficient public key cryptography in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As Wireless Sensor Networks are getting to be more applied in commercial solutions (e.g. Smart Grid and Energy Saving Outdoor Lighting) the more important issue, is to provide proper security. This paper gives a comprehensive study of threats faced by Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks defined by IEEE 802.15.4. Although several security protocols have been developed to address this issue most of them are aimed just for a particular layer or application. Furthermore, they usually introduce great overhead in terms of energy and communication. Our effort is not just to point out security problems, but to propose energy efficient solution. We introduce and analyze energy efficient system providing symmetric key cryptography and public key cryptography so that both are possible to compute with help of advanced encryption standard hardware accelerator. We show that this hardware based solution is more than 100 times more energy efficient than purely software solution. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.