Title: Elliptic curve cryptography-based access control in sensor networks

Authors: Haodong Wang, Bo Sheng, Qun Li

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

Abstract: Access control in sensor networks is used to authorise and grant users the right to access the network and data collected by sensors. Different users have different access right due to the access restriction implicated by the data security and confidentiality. Even though symmetric-key scheme, which has been investigated extensively for sensor networks, can fulfil the requirement, public-key cryptography is more flexible and simple rendering a clean interface for the security component. Against the popular belief that a public key scheme is not practical for sensor networks, this paper describes a public-key implementation of access control in a sensor network. We detail the implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) over primary field, a public-key cryptography scheme, on TelosB, which is the latest sensor network platform. We evaluate the performance of our implementation and compare with other implementations we have ported to TelosB.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; public key crytography; elliptic curve crytography; ECC; access control; wireless networks; security.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2006.011772

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2006 Vol.1 No.3/4, pp.127 - 137

Published online: 21 Dec 2006 *

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