Optimized hardware design and implementation of EC based key management scheme for WSN

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of an integrated architecture for key exchange and authentication in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) employing elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for key management. Instead of implementing a standard algorithm such as SHA or AES for authentication, this paper considers an elliptic curve based message authentication code (MAC) for optimized design of overall structure through hardware reuse. The proposed architecture time shares the point multiplication unit between functionalities of key exchange and MAC there by reducing the structural complexity. The proposed architecture is implemented over GF(2 163 ) on a Kintex 7 FPGA board using Xilinx ISE. The EC point multiplication is done using Lopez-Dahab algorithm and the finite field elements are represented using Gaussian normal basis to reduce the computational complexity and resist side channel attack.

A Coprocessor Architecture for 80/112-bit Security Related Applications

“…The ECC-based hardware accelerators specific to wireless sensor nodes on ASIC and FPGA platforms are described in [24][25][26][27][28]. In [24], a new ECC-based protocol followed with a coprocessor hardware design for key distribution in wireless sensor nodes is presented over GF 2 163 .…”

“…They have connected standard motes with the FPGA for visualization purposes while performing the actual cryptographic computations on the standard motes. An ECC-based integrated hardware architecture for wireless sensor nodes is presented in [26] over GF 2 163 on Kintex-7 FPGA. Apart from the use of a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) or Advance Encryption Standard (AES) for authentication purposes, their design implements an Elliptic-curve based message authentication code (MAC) for efficient reuse of FPGA resources.…”

“…The hardware accelerators of ECC are specifically concentrating on the hardware resource optimizations and decreasing the power consumption for wireless sensor nodes and RFID applications [13,18,21,[24][25][26][27][28]. A schoolbook multiplication method is frequently employed in the literature as it reduces the hardware resources and achieves lower power consumption.…”