Title: A time stamp-based elliptic curve cryptosystem for wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

Authors: Gaurav Indra; Renu Taneja

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, New Delhi, India ' Department of ECE, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Mewar University, Rajasthan, India

Abstract: Public key cryptography has been playing an important and vital role in providing security in various domains including secure electronic transactions in distributed environment and secure communication between different nodes in a wireless ad-hoc network. The security in wireless sensor networks is currently provided mostly through symmetric key cryptography. The proposed protocols in this domain are mainly based on the idea of keys before the deployment of the wireless sensor network. However, due to the limitation on memory resources of wireless sensor nodes, these protocols are not able to achieve perfect security and also face a key management problem in large scale wireless sensor networks. On the other hand asymmetric key cryptography offers flexibility to node and clean interface for the security component in the sensor network. This paper proposes a new mutual authentication and key management scheme for a particular session between any two corresponding nodes of a wireless sensor network based on elliptic curve cryptography with a novel time stamp mechanism. Nevertheless the same mutual authentication and key management scheme for a particular session in wireless sensor networks can be extended efficiently for a multi-session scenario in domain of wireless sensor networks or in the wired or wireless ad-hoc networks.

Keywords: public key cryptography; ad-hoc networks; elliptic curve cryptography; ECC; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; time stamp mechanism; key management; wireless networks; network security; mutual authentication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2014.060687

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2014 Vol.4 No.1, pp.39 - 54

Received: 31 Jul 2013
Accepted: 12 Jan 2014
Published online: 05 Jul 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article