TinyECC: A Configurable Library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

TLDR

Public key cryptography underlies many security services, and elliptic curve cryptography is being explored in wireless sensor networks for its efficiency. This work presents TinyECC, a configurable library designed to provide ready‑to‑use ECC operations for sensor network applications. TinyECC offers optimization switches that allow developers to tailor execution time and resource consumption, and its performance was evaluated on MICAz, Tmote Sky, and Imotel platforms. The evaluation demonstrates how individual optimizations affect runtime and memory, and identifies the most computationally efficient and the most storage‑efficient configurations.

Abstract

Public key cryptography (PKC) has been the enabling technology underlying many security services and protocols in traditional networks such as the Internet. In the context of wireless sensor networks, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), one of the most efficient types of PKC, is being investigated to provide PKC support in sensor network applications so that the existing PKC-based solutions can be exploited. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of TinyECC, a configurable library for ECC operations in wireless sensor networks. The primary objective of TinyECC is to provide a ready-to-use, publicly available software package for ECC-based PKC operations that can be flexibly configured and integrated into sensor network applications. TinyECC provides a number of optimization switches, which can turn specific optimizations on or off based on developers' needs. Different combinations of the optimizations have different execution time and resource consumptions, giving developers great flexibility in integrating TinyECC into sensor network applications. This paper also reports the experimental evaluation of TinyECC on several common sensor platforms, including MICAz, Tmote Sky, and Imotel. The evaluation results show the impacts of individual optimizations on the execution time and resource consumptions, and give the most computationally efficient and the most storage efficient configuration of TinyECC.