AN ECC-TIMESTAMP BASED MUTUAL AUTHENTICATION AND KEY MANAGEMENT SCHEME FOR WSNs

Abstract

Public Key Cryptography has been playing an important and vital role in providing security in various domains including secure electronic transactions in distributed environment and secure communication between different nodes in a wireless ad-hoc network. The security in Wireless Sensor Networks is currently provided mostly through symmetric key cryptography. The proposed protocols in this domain are mainly based on the idea of keys before the deployment of the Wireless Sensor Network. However, due to the limitation on memory resources of wireless sensor nodes, these protocols are not able to achieve perfect security and also face a key management problem in large scale wireless sensor networks. On the other hand asymmetric key cryptography offers flexibility to node and clean interface for the security component in the sensor network. This thesis proposes a novel Mutual Authentication and Key Management Scheme for a particular session between any two corresponding nodes of a Wireless Sensor Network based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography with a novel Timestamp Mechanism. Nevertheless the same Mutual Authentication and Key Management Scheme for a particular session in WSNs can be extended efficiently for a multi-session scenario in domain of WSNs or in the wired or wireless ad-hoc networks.