State of the art in ultra-low power public key cryptography for wireless sensor networks

Security in wireless sensor networks is currently provided exclusively through symmetric key cryptography. In this paper we show that special purpose ultra-low power hardware implementations of public key algorithms can be used on sensor nodes. The reduced protocol overhead due to public key cryptography (PKC) translates into less packet transmissions and hence, power savings. We provide an in-depth comparison of three popular public key implementations and describe how four fundamental security services benefit from PKC.