Embedded end-to-end wireless security with ECDH key exchange

Sensor networks offer tremendous benefits for the future as they have the potential to make life more convenient and safer. For instance, sensors can be used for climate control to reduce power consumption, for structures such as bridges to monitor the maintenance status, or for company badges to locate employees in order to increase productivity. However, the introduction of such ubiquitous computing to everyday life also raises privacy concerns. In this work the authors presented a public-key cryptography implementation for secure key exchange on low-end wireless devices using elliptic curves. The implementation is based on optimal extension fields (OEF) that are a special type of finite fields GF(p/sup m/). As for the platform, the authors chose a Chipcon CC1010 chip which is based on the 8051 architecture and that is especially suited for secure wireless applications as it has a built-in radio transceiver as well as a hardware DES engine. A secure end-to-end connection was established between the sensor and a base station in an acceptable time of 3 seconds without requiring cryptographic coprocessors.