A public-key infrastructure for key distribution in TinyOS based on elliptic curve cryptography

By David J. Malan, Matt Welsh, Michael D. Smith. 2004 First Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2004. IEEE SECON 2004., 2004

791 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first known implementation of elliptic curve cryptography over F/sub 2p/ for sensor networks based on the 8-bit, 7.3828-MHz MICA2 mote. Through instrumentation of UC Berkeley's TinySec module, we argue that, although secret-key cryptography has been tractable in this domain for some time, there has remained a need for an efficient, secure mechanism for distribution of secret keys among nodes. Although public-key infrastructure has been thought impractical, we argue, through analysis of our own implementation for TinyOS of multiplication of points on elliptic curves, that public-key infrastructure is, in fact, viable for TinySec keys' distribution, even on the MICA2. We demonstrate that public keys can be generated within 34 seconds, and that shared secrets can be distributed among nodes in a sensor network within the same, using just over 1 kilobyte of SRAM and 34 kilobytes of ROM.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77f8cf7e431942ac81d64d1d82bde9ae55bd222d

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Citations in the corpus

Sensor network security: a survey (2009, neutral): “Cryptography evaluation [19-24] Cryptography architectures [25-30]”
Secure Signature-Based Authenticated Key Establishment Scheme for Future IoT Applications (2017, background): “Developments in wireless technology have necessitated the implementation of schemes in this category [9], [10], [11], [12].”
Wireless sensor networks: A survey on the state of the art and the 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards (2007, background): “In the medical field sensor networks can be used to remotely and unobtrusively monitor physiological parameters of patients such as heartbeat or blood pressure, and report to the hospital when some parameters are altered [81,37,5,82].”
TinyECC: A Configurable Library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks (2008, background): “In traditional networks such as the Internet, Public Key Cryptography (PKC) has been the enabling technology underlying many security services and protocols (e.g., SSL [3] and IPsec [18]).”
Securing wireless sensor networks: a survey (2008, methodology): “For example, Tiny public key (TinyPK) [63] uses RSA-based certificates to authenticate external parties before they can access the network, where the RSA [18] public key is chosen as e = 3, such that the signature verification at the sensor side is simplified.”
Security in Wireless Sensor Networks (2008, neutral): “Malan et al. (2004) propose a scheme based on ECC and show an implementation of the Diffie-Hellman algorithm based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem.”
A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security (2009, methodology): “For example, the work in [24,45] concentrated on the public key operations only, assuming the private key operations will be performed by a base station or a third party.”
NanoECC: Testing the Limits of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Sensor Networks (2008, methodology): “[9] have presented the first ECC implementation over binary fields GF (2) for sensor nodes.”
A survey of security issues in wireless sensor networks (2006, methodology): “For example, the work in [33, 45 ] concentrated on the public key operations only, assuming the private key operations will be performed by a base station or a third party.”
Key management systems for sensor networks in the context of the Internet of Things (2011, background): “The time to execute the main cryptographic operation of ECC, the scalar point multiplication, has been reduced from 34 s [31] in 2004 to less than 0.5 s [26] in 2009.”
Location-based compromise-tolerant security mechanisms for wireless sensor networks (2006, background): “However, many researchers [38], [44]–[47] have recently challenged this belief by showing that traditional PKC such as RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography is rather viable in WSNs.”
A dynamic user authentication scheme for wireless sensor networks (2006, methodology): “The authors claimed that ECC is still feasible for sensor nodes.”
A Survey on Emerging SDN and NFV Security Mechanisms for IoT Systems (2019, background): “Other cryptosystems include PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) which is an end-to-end authentication and key agreement mechanism whereby a trusted public entity stores digital certificates and verifies the identity of involved parties [91].”
Key distribution mechanisms for wireless sensor networks : a survey (2005, background): “Although there are ongoing works [Malan et al. 2004; Gaubatz et al. 2004; Huang et al. 2003] to customize public key cryptography and elliptic key cryptography for low-power devices, such approaches are still considered as costly due to high processing requirements.”
TinySec: a link layer security architecture for wireless sensor networks (2004, positive): “TinyCrypt, still in development at Harvard, aims to use elliptic curve cryptography to exchange TinySec keys for the Mica2 sensor nodes [32].”
Wireless Sensor Network Security: A Survey (2006, methodology): “The Diffie-Hellman Elliptic Curve Key Exchange Algorithm [49].”
A survey of key management schemes in wireless sensor networks (2007, methodology): “An MICA2 mote developed by the University of California at Berkeley has an 8-bit 7.3 MHz processor with 4 KB RAM and 128 KB of programmable ROM [26].”
MiniSec: A Secure Sensor Network Communication Architecture (2007, methodology): “Asymmetric schemes based on elliptic curve cryptography [15] and Diffie-Hellman [22].”