Energy-Efficient and Secure Clustering with Post-Quantum DTLS in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, the standard Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) protocol is integrated with the widely used Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) routing protocol for secure clustering in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with pre-quantum and post-quantum authenticated key exchange, referred to as DTLS-LEACH and pqDTLS-LEACH respectively. Strong security guarantees of the DTLS protocol ensure that various security requirements of WSNs are satisfied. Detailed analysis of cryptographic computation and communication costs is presented using elliptic curve cryptography (pre-quantum) and lattice-based cryptography (post-quantum), followed by a system-level energy model. An efficient certificate public key caching scheme is also proposed which reduces handshake computation and communication costs by 30% and 50% respectively, while having 2.5× smaller storage requirement.