Efficient Public Key Infrastructure Implementation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Ad-hoc networks particularly Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) have been widely used in many areas for unattended event monitoring. Confidentiality and authenticity are two important security services required for almost every WSN application. However, small memory, weak processor and limited battery power of the sensor nodes are the major obstacles to implement advanced security primitives in them. However the new development of sensors technologies may allow more computational power and gives us the possibility to use public key encryption in WSN if the used algorithm is energy efficient such as ECC. Owing to both, the requirement as well as the obstacles, this paper proposes a lightweight implementation of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) tailored to implement in resource restrained sensor nodes. We propose a protocol to implement PKI uses public key encryption only for some specific tasks as session key setup between the base station and sensors giving the network an acceptable threshold of confidentiality and authentication.