Towards Acceptable Public-Key Encryption in Sensor Networks

One of the huge problems for security in sensor networks is the lack of resources. Based on microcontroller architectures with severe limited computing abilities, strong public-key cryptography is commonly seen as infeasible on sensor devices. In contrast to this prejudice this paper presents an efficient and lightweight implementation of public-key cryptography algorithms relying on elliptic curves. The code is running on Atmels popular 8Bit ATMEGA128 microcontroller, the heart of the MICA2[15] platform. To our knowledge this implementation is the first to offer acceptable encryption speed while providing adequate security in sensor networks. 1