ELLIPTIC CURVE ALGORITHM USAGE IN WIRELESS SECURITY WITH PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY (original) (raw)

Public key techniques revolutionized cryptography. Over the last twenty years however, new techniques have been developed which offer both better performance and higher security than these first generation public key techniques. The best-assured group of new public key techniques is built on the arithmetic of elliptic curves. This paper will outline a case for moving to elliptic curves as a foundation for future Internet security. This case will be based on both the relative security offered by elliptic curves and first generation public key systems and the relative performance of these algorithms. While at current security levels elliptic curves offer significant benefits over existing public key algorithms, as one scales security upwards over time to meet the evolving threat posed by eavesdroppers and hackers with access to greater computing resources, elliptic curves begin to offer dramatic savings over the old, first generation techniques. The two noteworthy first generation public key algorithms used to secure the Internet today are known as RSA and Diffie-Hellman (DH). The security of the first is based on the difficulty of factoring the product of two large primes. The second is related to a problem known as the discrete logarithm problem for finite groups. Both are based on the use of elementary number theory. Interestingly, the security of the two schemes, though formulated differently, is closely related. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in healthcare are one of the most important and rapidly growing areas. One of the most critical security concerns is patients' privacy. Since patients are monitored all the time, authentication of who can access the information, and what information one is authorized to access are indispensable to maintain privacy. In health-care environments, authentication and access control face a big challenge due to dynamic network topology, mobility, and stringent resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a secure, scalable, and energy-efficient security scheme called Mutual Authentication and Access Control scheme based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (MAACE). MAACE provides mutual authentication where a healthcare professional can authenticate to an accessed node (a PDA or medical sensor) and vice versa. This is to ensure that medical data is not exposed to an unauthorized person. On the other hand, it ensures that medical data sent to healthcare professionals did not originate from a malicious node. By applying elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), MAACE provides a public key approach which is more scalable and requires less memory compared to symmetric key-based schemes. Furthermore, it is practically feasible to implement it on sensor platforms. Security analysis and performance evaluation results are presented and compared to existing schemes to show advantages of the proposed scheme. Keywords: Public Key, Cryptography, ECC, RSA, Geo-Graphic Information System.