EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Adaptable Security in Wireless Sensor Networks by Using Reconfigurable ECC Hardware Coprocessors

J. Portilla, A. Otero, E. de la Torre, T. Riesgo, O. Stecklina, S. Peter and P. Langendörfer

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 2010, vol. 6, issue 1, 740823

Abstract: Specific features of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) like the open accessibility to nodes, or the easy observability of radio communications, lead to severe security challenges. The application of traditional security schemes on sensor nodes is limited due to the restricted computation capability, low-power availability, and the inherent low data rate. In order to avoid dependencies on a compromised level of security, a WSN node with a microcontroller and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used along this work to implement a state-of-the art solution based on ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). In this paper it is described how the reconfiguration possibilities of the system can be used to adapt ECC parameters in order to increase or reduce the security level depending on the application scenario or the energy budget. Two setups have been created to compare the software- and hardware-supported approaches. According to the results, the FPGA-based ECC implementation requires three orders of magnitude less energy, compared with a low power microcontroller implementation, even considering the power consumption overhead introduced by the hardware reconfiguration.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1155/2010/740823 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intdis:v:6:y:2010:i:1:p:740823

DOI: 10.1155/2010/740823

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:intdis:v:6:y:2010:i:1:p:740823