Optimized Implementation of Elliptic Curve Based Additive Homomorphic Encryption for Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimized implementation of elliptic curve additive homomorphic encryption on sensor nodes, significantly improving efficiency for secure data aggregation in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks.

Contribution

It introduces a faster implementation of EC-ElGamal encryption on low-power sensor hardware, enabling more efficient secure data aggregation in WSNs.

Findings

At least 44% faster fixed-point multiplication performance.

Implementation suitable for constrained devices like MicaZ motes.

Results applicable to other elliptic curve algorithms on similar hardware.

Abstract

When deploying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in public environments it may become necessary to secure their data storage and transmission against possible attacks such as node-compromise and eavesdropping. The nodes feature only small computational and energy resources, thus requiring efficient algorithms. As a solution for this problem the TinyPEDS approach was proposed in [7], which utilizes the Elliptic Curve ElGamal (EC-ElGamal) cryptosystem for additive homomorphic encryption allowing concealed data aggregation. This work presents an optimized implementation of EC-ElGamal on a MicaZ mote, which is a typical sensor node platform with 8-bit processor for WSNs. Compared to the best previous result, our implementation is at least 44% faster for fixed-point multiplication. Because most parts of the algorithm are similar to standard Elliptic Curve algorithms, the results may be reused in other realizations on constrained devices as well.