SELF-CERTIFIED PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract. As sensor networks continue to become one of the key technologies to realize ubiquitous computing, promising to revolutionize our ability to sense and control the physical environment, security remains a growing concern. The resource-constrained characteristics of sensor nodes, the ad-hoc nature of their deployment, and the vulnerability of wireless communications in general pose a need for unique solutions. A fundamental requisite for achieving security is the ability to encrypt and decrypt con…dential data among arbitrary sensor nodes, necessitating the generation of joint private keys. Although the advantage of public key cryptographic key-generation is widely acknowledged, o¤ering scalability and decentralized management, the scarce resources of sensor networks render the applicability of public key methodologies highly challenging. In this respect, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as a suitable public key cryptographic foundation in constrained environments, providing high security for relatively small key sizes. Recent results indicate that the execution of ECC operations in sensor nodes is feasible. In an e¤ort to promote practical adoption of ECC-based key-generation in sensor networks, this paper presents a comprehensive security methodology that signi…cantly reduces the overall communication and computation e¤orts involved. The technology developed has been implemented on Intel Mote2 platforms at the University of Tennessee. The encouraging performance results obtained accentuate the practicality and scalability properties of the proposed approach. Key words. Security in wireless sensor networks, resource-constrained cryptography, selfcerti…ed key generation, Intel Mote