On the Energy Cost of Communication and Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is a central concern in the deployment of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we investigate the energy cost of cryptographic protocols, both from a communication and a computation point of view, based on practical measurements on the MICAz and TelosB sensors. We focus on the cost of two key agreement protocols: Kerberos and the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange with authentication provided by the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDH-ECDSA). We find that, in our context, Kerberos is around one order of magnitude less costly than the ECDH-ECDSA key exchange and confirm that it should be preferred in situations where a trusted third party is available. We also observe that the power dedicated to communications can become a central concern when the nodes need to stay in listen mode, e.g. between the protocol rounds, even when reduced using a low power listening (LPL) protocol. Therefore, listening should be considered when assessing the cost of cryptographic protocols on sensor nodes.

[1]  Ingrid Verbauwhede,et al.  Reducing radio energy consumption of key management protocols for wireless sensor networks , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8758).

[2]  Alan O. Freier,et al.  The SSL Protocol Version 3.0 , 1996 .

[3]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[4]  Vipul Gupta,et al.  Sizzle: a standards-based end-to-end security architecture for the embedded Internet , 2005, Third IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

[5]  Ingrid Verbauwhede,et al.  The energy cost of secrets in ad-hoc networks , 2002 .

[6]  Alfred Menezes,et al.  Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography , 2004, Springer Professional Computing.

[7]  Peng Ning,et al.  2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks TinyECC: A Configurable Library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks ∗ , 2022 .

[8]  Yee Wei Law,et al.  Survey and benchmark of block ciphers for wireless sensor networks , 2006, TOSN.

[9]  Theodore Y. Ts'o,et al.  Kerberos: an authentication service for computer networks , 1994, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[10]  Peter Langendörfer,et al.  How public key cryptography influences wireless sensor node lifetime , 2006, SASN '06.

[11]  David E. Culler,et al.  Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks , 2004, SenSys '04.

[12]  Hans Eberle,et al.  Comparing Elliptic Curve Cryptography and RSA on 8-bit CPUs , 2004, CHES.

[13]  Jeongyeup Paek,et al.  A wireless sensor network for structural health monitoring: performance and experience , 2005, The Second IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, 2005. EmNetS-II..

[14]  Johann Großschädl,et al.  The energy cost of cryptographic key establishment in wireless sensor networks , 2007, ASIACCS '07.

[15]  Vipul Gupta,et al.  Energy analysis of public-key cryptography for wireless sensor networks , 2005, Third IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

[16]  Elfed Lewis,et al.  Efficiently securing data on a wireless sensor network , 2007 .

[17]  Marc Girault,et al.  Server-Aided Verification: Theory and Practice , 2005, ASIACRYPT.