Lightweight Key Establishment for WSNs

Abstract

In this paper we present two Lightweight Key Establishment (LKE) solutions for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). We explore area and energy oriented design goals. The protocol used in the LKE systems, relies on novel lightweight elliptic curve scalar multiplication architectures and on a lightweight block cipher. We evaluate both LKE solutions in FPGA using area, energy, and performance metrics. Our main contributions are an area-oriented core with minimal size, and an energy-oriented variant which reduces the energy profile by ~90% while maintaining reduced area costs.