Performance Evaluation of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the increased use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in military, health monitoring, commercial, and home environments, developing a strong and durable security architecture ensuring confidentiality, integrity and authentication becomes necessary. The well-known traditional cryptosystems cannot be simply transferred to WSNs and must be modified to adapt them to the specific characteristics of WSNs. This paper shows a performance evaluation of RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography in WSNs using encryption time, key size and energy consumption as evaluation criteria.