NanoECC: Testing the Limits of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Sensor Networks

By using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), it has been recently shown that Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) is indeed feasible on resource-constrained nodes. This feasibility, however, does not necessarily mean attractiveness, as the obtained results are still not satisfactory enough. In this paper, the authors present results on implementing ECC, as well as the related emerging field of Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC), on two of the most popular sensor nodes. By doing that, they show that PKC is not only viable, but in fact attractive for WSNs. As far as they know pairing computations presented in this paper are the most efficient results on the MICA2 (8-bit/7.3828-MHz ATmega128L) and Tmote Sky (16-bit/8.192-MHz MSP-430) nodes.