Elliptic curve cryptography based encryption algorithms for secured routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The current era has seen an explosive growth in data communications through the internet. Applications like online banking, personal digital assistants, mobile communication, smartcards, etc. have emphasized the need for security in resource constrained environments. Moreover, sensor networks provide a way to collect data from the environment for providing many essential services including vehicle movements in roads, body sensors for health monitoring, agricultural sensor for effective production, home appliances and military applications. In such a scenario, security of data communicated through wireless sensor networks is a challenging issue to be addressed for the successful implementation of sensor networks based applications. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) serves as a perfect cryptographic technique for providing security on communications in sensor networks because of its short key sizes and efficiency compared to other standard public key algorithms. However, to match the ever increasing requirement of spped in today s applications, effective key management techniques to suit the hardware acceleration of the computations for cryptographic algorithms is a necessity without compromising the overall network performance. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the key size of public key cryptographic algorithms for fast key computation and encryption. In addition, the key generation process must involve the computation of additional functions for enhancing the security. Hence, the important functions present in mathematical theory have been used in this research work to form more secured keys for communications. newline newline