WM-ECC: an Elliptic Curve Cryptography Suite on Sensor Motes

Abstract

While symmetric-key schemes, which have been investigated extensively for sensor network security, can fulfill many security requirements, public-key schemes are more flexible, and provide a clean interface for security components. In contradiction of the popular belief that public key scheme is not practical for sensor networks, this technical report describes th e ECC (Elliptic Curve Crytography) public-key cryptosystem implementation on the existing commercial sensor devices. We detail the implementation of 160-bit ECC cryptosystems over prime field on MICAz, Telos B and Tmote Sky sensor motes. We evaluate the performance of our implementation by running digital signature generation and verification. We have achieved the performance of 0.77s for signature generation and 1.12s for signature verification on Tmote Sky sensor motes. Comparatively, we show the performance on MICAz and TelosB motes are 1.35s and 1.45s for signature generation, 1.96 and 2.25 for signature verification, respectively. This technical report summarize our previous implementation effort presented in [11, 12, 13, 10].