Energy-efficient multiplication method for ECC in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSN´s)are highly resource constrained and require energy efficient and strong cryptographic techniques to ensure secure connectivity. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a very popular public key cryptography technique due to the extremely complex and difficult Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), it relies upon. In this paper, a technique for speeding up point multiplication, a fundamental operation involved in ECC, is presented. Specifically, the computation cost of the width-w Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) method of point multiplication is drastically reduced by employing a mixed coordinate system to perform the basic point doubling and addition operations. This paper demonstrates that this technique results in a reduction of about 62% in the number of field multiplications required when compared to the traditional techniques for elliptic curve point multiplication.