Performance evaluation of twisted Edwards‐form elliptic curve cryptography for wireless sensor nodes

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) pose a number of unique security challenges that demand innovation in several areas including the design of cryptographic primitives and protocols. Despite recent progress, the efficient implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for WSNs is still a very active research topic, and techniques to further reduce the time and energy cost of ECC are eagerly sought. This paper presents an optimized ECC implementation that we developed from scratch to comply with the severe resource constraints of 8‐bit sensor nodes such as the MICAz and IRIS motes. Our ECC software uses Optimal Prime Fields as underlying algebraic structure and supports two different families of elliptic curves, namely, Weierstraß‐form and twisted Edwards‐form curves. Due to the combination of efficient field arithmetic and fast group operations, we achieve an execution time of 5.3·106 clock cycles for a full 160‐bit scalar multiplication on an 8‐bit ATmega128 microcontroller, which is more than three times faster than the widely used TinyECC library. Our implementation also shows that the energy cost of scalar multiplication on a MICAz (or IRIS) mote amounts to just 17.34mJ when using a twisted Edwards curve over a 160‐bit Optimal Prime Field. This result further demonstrates the advantage of special family of elliptic curves for resource‐constrained environments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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