Efficient Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem with Expedite Point Multiplication Method for Resource Constrained Environments

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks, Body Area Networks, and IoT, the various components involved are connected through radio channels enabling data transmission in between them.   These components are smaller in size, therefore are of having restricted computation, storage, and battery life.  Since operating in an open wireless environment, they are much prone to attackers of various kinds. The security systems available to mitigate the attacks on these networks have authentication, integrity, and confidentiality as crucial security requirements.  Many of these security protocols make use of Elliptic Curve Crypto Systems (ECC), Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithmic Problem (ECDLP) to offer security in the networks.  The smaller size of keys in ECC permits to execute security algorithms faster and make it suitable for the resource-constrained environment in extending battery life by consuming less energy.  However, among the two tasks constituting ECC, the point multiplication operation takes more time for encryption and decryption of data than the addition operation. This paper proposes a secured and energy minimized expedite point multiplication (EPM) operation.  The performance assessments of EPM against binary and non-adjacent format (NAF), the existing point multiplication methods, are promising and shows that EPM provides faster and energy-efficient ECC algorithm suitable for limited energy environments.