Fast elliptic curve point multiplication for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks facilitate real-time data processing in many applications such as intrusion detection and military surveillance. These applications inherently demand a high level of security. Public key cryptographic techniques such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) provide a flexible interface to ensure security, requiring no pre-distribution of keys. However, ECC is very compute-intensive, owing to the computationally complex elliptic curve point multiplication operation. This work presents a technique to speed up the elliptic curve point multiplication operation, achieving a cost reduction of about 48% over the double and add algorithm and about 40% over the width-w Non Adjacent Form (NAF) algorithm. Additionally, results of its software implementation are also presented, simulating the specifications of MEMSIC´s wireless sensor network development kit. Finally, we conclude that the timing results obtained from the software implementation conform to the theoretical results.