Abstract. By using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), it has been recently shown that Public-Key Cryptography (PKC) is indeed feasible on resource-constrained nodes. This feasibility, however, does not necessarily mean attractiveness, as the obtained results are still not satisfactory enough. In this paper, we present results on implementing ECC, as well as the related emerging field of Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC), on two of the most popular sensor nodes. By doing that, we show that PKC is not only viable, but in fact attractive for WSNs. As far as we know pairing computations presented in this paper are the most efficient results on the MICA2 (8-bit/7.3828-MHz ATmega128L) and Tmote Sky nodes.

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Abstract-Despite much research effort key distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) still remains an open problem. In this paper we address this issue by proposing a simple identitybased key agreement scheme. Our protocol uses Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) and secret key pre-distribution. We argue that IBC is in many ways a perfect solution for WSNs. It reduces the number of required keys, simplifying the key management in the network, and has a lower communications overhead than traditional public key protocols.We evaluate our proposal on a broad range of sensor platforms to show its efficiency on different CPU architectures. A complete key agreement procedure takes less than 3s on a resourceconstrained Tmote Sky node without requiring any communication between two parties. To our knowledge this work is the first practical implementation of a complete IBC scheme on sensor devices.We identify a range of WSN applications which would benefit from the incorporation of a security architecture, and show that the scheme described here makes it feasible to deploy these applications in the real world.

Abstract-The area of security for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks (HSNs) is still an open research field that requires new cryptographic solutions. Recent results have demonstrated that Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC) are computationally feasible on sensor devices. This allows a wide range of novel security mechanisms, like IdentityBased Encryption (IBE), to be considered for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs).In this paper we present an efficient security bootstrapping mechanism for HSNs that uses IBE and exploits the enhanced capabilities of high-end cluster heads. Our asymmetric security scheme provides authenticated key distribution without using expensive certificates. It also achieves significant savings in communication overhead and in the number of keys stored on sensor devices. We also present TinyIBE, which is to our knowledge, the first implementation of a complete identitybased encryption scheme for sensor networks. Our evaluation results and comparison with the state of the art show that TinyIBE is a superior security scheme for HSNs which provides affordable public key cryptography without requiring hardware acceleration. With this work we prove that ID-based encryption is not only possible on sensor nodes but is an attractive security solution in this application space.