Security protocol using elliptic curve cryptography algorithm for WSNs

Abstract

Information security broadly refers to the state of protection against unsanctioned access of information or data, principally electronic or digital data. In today’s world of modern technology, there is a need to design and develop security measures in order to protect information from various security risks and threats. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) holds a significant importance in this era of technological world; as its wide range of applications are being used around the globe in almost every domain. Whether it’s a network of smart cities or a network for military, health care applications or smart traffic, WSNs are everywhere and holds prime importance. As, WSNs are being used in almost every field of life; therefore, securing such networks becomes a primary task for the developers. WSNs are being deployed with several constraints and limitations, due to which deploying security mechanisms on such networks becomes a difficult task for the developers. There has been a lot of work done in this field and the process is still going on but there were different gaps which were not cater during the previous research. Therefore, this research work specifically targeted security issues in WSNs and hence subjected to provide authentication and data encryption in a novel manner for node to node communication over WSNs. The proposed scheme not only provide security for node to node communication network but also hoards memory space on nodes with the help of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) cryptography. There has been lot of work done for WSNs with the help of ECDSA but no work has been evaluated on the parameters mentioned in this research work, therefore choosing ECDSA for this research work has been an appropriate choice for measuring key generation time, count of hello message and packet size during node to node communication. Furthermore, the Algorithm for WSN node’s Secure Communication (AWSC) also provides the finest suitable key management in order to implement the algorithm with acceptable key length with the help of ECDSA AWSC has been tested on physical sensor motes with dummy data and the algorithm found to be working according to the requirements specifications. However, AWSC has been evaluated for security, communication and computation analysis. The key establishment has been evaluated on three different parameters i.e. key generation time, number of hello message and size of data packet; the results of these three parameters proved that AWSC is one of the fine approach for securing data communication on nodes in WSNs.