An Authenticated Key Scheme over Elliptic Curves for Topological Networks
This work addresses scalability and adaptability issues in sensor network security, though it appears incremental as it builds on an existing protocol.
The paper tackles the problem of managing cryptographic protocols in dynamic sensor networks with resource-constrained nodes by proposing a novel elliptic-curve based solution derived from TAKS, which reduces the cost of network updates by leveraging node topology over identity.
Nodes of sensor networks may be resource-constrained devices, often having a limited lifetime, making sensor networks remarkably dynamic environments. Managing a cryptographic protocol on such setups may require a disproportionate effort when it comes to update the secret parameters of new nodes that enter the network in place of dismantled sensors. For this reason, the designers of schemes for sensor network are always concerned with the need of scalable and adaptable solutions. In this work, we present a novel elliptic-curve based solution, derived from the previously released cryptographic protocol TAKS, which addresses this issue. We give a formal description of the scheme, built on a two-dimensional vector space over a prime field and over elliptic curves, where node topology is more relevant than node identity, allowing a dynamic handling of the network and reducing the cost of network updates. We also study some security concerns and their relation to the related discrete logarithm problem over elliptic curves.