Analyzing and modeling encryption overhead for sensor network nodes

Recent research in sensor networks has raised security issues for small embedded devices. Security concerns are motivated by the deployment of a large number of sensory devices in the field. Limitations in processing power, battery life, communication bandwidth and memory constrain the applicability of existing cryptography standards for small embedded devices. A mismatch between wide arithmetic for security (32 bit word operations) and embedded data bus widths (often only 8 or 16 bits) combined with lack of certain operations (e.g., multiply) in the ISA present other challenges. This paper offers two contributions. First, a survey investigating the computational requirements for a number of popular cryptographic algorithms and embedded architectures is presented. The objective of this work is to cover a wide class of commonly used encryption algorithms and to determine the impact of embedded architectures on their performance. This will help designers predict a system’s performance...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: WSNA
• Authors: Prasanth Ganesan, Ramnath Venugopalan, Pushkin Peddabachagari, Alexander G. Dean, Frank Mueller, Mihail L. Sichitiu
• Keywords: Embedded Architectures, Encryption, Sensor Networks, Small Embedded Devices, WSNA 2003