Portable and Improved Implementation of the Diffie-Hellman Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor nodes generally face serious limitations in terms of computational power, energy supply, and network bandwidth. One of the biggest challenges faced by researches today is to provide effective and secure techniques for establishing cryptographic keys between wireless sensor networks. Public-key algorithms (such as the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol) generally have high energy requirements because they require computational expensive operations. So far, due to the limited computation power of the wireless sensor devices, the Diffie-Hellman protocol is considered to be beyond the capabilities of today's sensor networks. We analyzed existing methods of implementing Diffie-Hellman and proposed a new improved method of implementing the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol for establishing secure keys between wireless sensor nodes. We also provide an easy-to-use implementation of the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol for use in wireless sensor networks.