Anton Kargl

On the application of pairing based cryptography to wireless sensor networks

Recent research results have shown that Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is feasible on resource constrained sensor nodes. In this work we demonstrate that the related but more complex primitives of Pairing Based Cryptography(PBC) are also well suited for sensor devices. We present the first in-depth study on the application and implementation of PBC to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Our implementations are all the fastest yet reported, and have been implemented across a range of WSN processors. On a system level we investigate the application of a simple non-interactive key exchange scheme that is particularly suitable for many WSN scenarios. We also present a novel variant of the key exchange protocol which can be useful in even more demanding applications, and which partially solves the problem of node compromise attacks.