Security protocol using elliptic curve cryptography algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Information security broadly refers to the state of protection against unsanctioned access to 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 to protect information from various security risks and threats. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) hold significant importance in this era of the technological world; as its wide range of applications are being used around the globe in almost every domain. 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. 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. The proposed scheme not only provides security for the node to node communication network but also hoards memory space on nodes with the help of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) cryptographic scheme to provide an appropriate mechanism for measuring key generation time, count of hello message and packet size. Furthermore, the Algorithm for Wireless Secure Communication (ASCW) also provides key management with acceptable key length. In addition to this, ASCW helps in securing the communication on node level which helps in securing the whole network in a better and efficient manner. ASCW also reduces the cost of risk and security threats on the network with the help of authentication mechanism. A physical testbed has designed based on devices and sensor motes according to the required specifications. The proposed solutions have evaluated in terms of key generation time, several hello message and size of data packets. Experimental results have indicated that ASCW is one of the suitable and a novel approach for securing data on nodes during communication in WSNs.