Wireless Network Security Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

As wireless sensor networks continue to grow, so does the need for effective security mechanisms. Sensor networks may interact with sensitive data and/or operate in hostile unattended environments, it needs to be secured. It is an important challenge to find out suitable cryptography for wireless sensor networks due to limitations of energy, computation capability and storage resources. We present a comparison of two public-key algorithms, RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We found ECC to have a significant advantage over RSA as it reduces computation time and also the amount of data transmitted and stored.