Optimized Implementation of Elliptic Curve Based Additive Homomorphic Encryption for Wireless Sensor Networks

Published in: 2nd Workshop on Embedded Systems Security (WESS'2007), A Workshop of the IEEE/ACM EMSOFT'2007 and the Embedded Systems Week, Salzburg, Austria, October 4, 2007

Abstract

When deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in public environments it may become necessary to secure their data storage and transmission against possible attacks such as node-compromise and eavesdropping. The nodes feature only small computational and energy resources, thus requiring efficient algorithms. As a solution for this problem the TinyPEDS approach was proposed, which utilizes the Elliptic Curve ElGamal (EC-ElGamal) cryptosystem for additive homomorphic encryption allowing concealed data aggregation. This work presents an optimized implementation of EC-ElGamal on a MicaZ mote, which is a typical sensor node platform with 8-bit processor for WSNs. Compared to the best previous result, our implementation is at least 44% faster for fixed-point multiplication. Because most parts of the algorithm are similar to standard Elliptic Curve algorithms, the results may be reused in other realizations on constrained devices as well.

Authors

Osman Ugus, Ralf Laue, Dirk Westhoff, Abdulhadi Shoufan, and Sorin A. Huss

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