An Energy and Communication Efficient Group Key in Sensor Networks Using Elliptic Curve Polynomial

Abstract

Sensor nodes have limited computation and battery power, and are not very reliable. A sensor network needs to be secure against eavesdrop when it is deployed in hostile environments. In order to provide security at low cost, symmetric key based approaches [11] have been proposed. In [9], an elliptic curve cryptography based approach has been implemented to facilitate the public-key cryptography. However, these schemes become ineffective in terms memory usage, communication time and energy required with the rapidly growing network size. We propose an Energy and Communication Efficient Group key management (ECEG) scheme which reduces the usage of memory, communication and energy in sensors. This scheme designed based on the idea that each node is pre-loaded with a key chain and an elliptic curve. In our scheme instead of computing the key by collaborating with other nodes a point of the elliptic curve broadcasted from the base station is used to compute the key. The simulations conducted using TinyOS [15] shows that ECEG scheme significantly improves the communication and energy usage in computing the key over EccM [9].