Efficient and Scalable Public Key Infrastructure for Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient and Scalable Public Key Infrastructure for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract—Ensuring security is essential in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since a variety of applications of WSNs, includ­ ing military, medical and industrial sectors, require several kinds of security services such as confidentiality, authentication, and integrity. However, ensuring security is not trivial in WSNs be­ cause of the limited resources of the sensor nodes. This has led a lot of researchers to focus on a symmetric key cryptography which is computationally lightweight, but requires a shared key between the sensor nodes. Public key cryptography < Final Year Projects 2016 > PKC not only solves this problem gracefully, but also provides enhanced security services such as non-repudiation and digital signatures. To take advantage of PKC, each node must have a public key of the corresponding node via an authenticated method. The most widely used way is to use digital signatures signed by a certificate authority which is a part of a public key infrastructure (PKI). Since traditional PKI requires a huge amount of computations and communications, it can be heavy burden to WSNs.