The impact of ECC's scalar multiplication on wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) becomes an attractive area of research, especially during the last few years. This is due to the large number of applications where the sensors are deployed and the security needs. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a public key approach that represents one of solution and even a serious candidate for providing security in WSN. Unfortunately, the execution time of its slightly complex operations makes the suitability of ECC broken to a limited number of applications. The most expensive operation in ECC is scalar point multiplication (SPM). However, the ECC based schemes depend strongly on the performance of SPM. The side channel attacks (SCA) on ECC exploit the information leaks during SPM execution in order to find the secret key. In this paper, we focus on scalar point multiplication, its efficiency and its security against SCA (in particular simple power analysis). The experimental results are realized on the 16 bits TelosB mote.