Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
platforms would require optimization. Among the platforms presented in the above
table, the most popular platforms are MICA2DOT, MICA2, and MICAz, with an
8-bit ATmega128 processor by Atmel Corporation.
9.6 Related Work
Recent technological advances have made it possible to develop WSN consisting of
a large number of low-cost, low-power, and multifunctional sensor nodes that com-
municate over short distances through wireless links. Such sensor networks are ideal
candidates for a wide range of civilian and military applications (Section 1.1.1). The
desirable features of WSN have attracted many researchers to develop protocols and
algorithms that can fulfill the requirements of these applications. For instance, security
services such as authentication, confidentiality, and key management are critical to
communication in WSN as well as the security of sensor network applications. In tradi-
tional networks such as the Internet, PKC has been the enabling technology underlying
many security services and protocols (e.g., Transport Layer Security [TLS] and Internet
Protocol security [IPsec]). In some instances, PKC has been used to bootstrap sym-
metric session keys and authenticate messages to multiple receivers. However, in WSN,
PKC has not been widely adopted due to resource constraints on sensor platforms,
particularly due to the limited and depleting battery power.
In recent years, there has been extensive research aimed at developing techniques
that aim towards circumventing PKC operations in sensor network applications. For
example, there has been a substantial amount of work done on random key predis-
tribution for pairwise key establishment (Section 6.3.4) and broadcast authentication
(Section 5.1). However, these alternative approaches do not offer the same degree of
security or functionality as PKC. For instance, none of the random key predistribution
schemes can guarantee key establishment between any two nodes and tolerate arbitrary
node compromises at the same time. As another example, broadcast authentication
schemes, which are all based on μTESLA (Section 5.2.1.2), require loose time syn-
chronization, which itself is a challenging task to achieve in WSN. In contrast, PKC
can address all the abovementioned issues. Pairwise key establishment can be achieved
using, for example, the DH key exchange protocol, without suffering from the node
compromise problem. Similarly, broadcast authentication can be provided with, for
example, the ECDSA digital signature scheme without requiring time synchronization.
Hence, it is desirable to explore the application of PKC on resource-constrained sensor
platforms (Section 9.1).
Despite the recent progress of ECC implementations on sensor platforms, all the
previous attempts have limitations. In particular, all these attempts were developed as
independent packages/applications, without seriously considering the resource demands
of sensor network applications. As a result, developers may find it difficult, and some-
times impossible, to integrate an ECC implementation with the sensor network appli-
cations, although the ECC implementation may be viable on its own. For example, an
ECC implementation may require so much RAM that it would be impossible to fit
both the sensor network application and the ECC implementation on the same node.
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