An analysis of public key cryptography based techniques in wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks, consisting of sensor devices equipped with energy limited batteries, have been widely used for surveillance and monitoring environment. Security is critical for sensor networks used in military, homeland security and other hostile environments. Previous research on sensor network security mainly use symmetric key cryptography but now interest in using public-key cryptography for securing sensor networks is increasing. Many researchers have tried to provide security by using only symmetric key mechanisms thinking that public key cryptosystems are not feasible to implement in these networks because they are constrained with less resources. The contribution of this work is a detailed study of several public key cryptography based techniques in WSNs. Our analysis revealed that the public key schemes based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) are more feasible in WSNs.