IoT Security

4Public Key Based Protocols – EC Crypto

Pawani Porambage An Braeken and Corinna Schmitt

Abstract

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is extensively applied in various security protocols for authentication and key management. ECC is a public key or asymmetric key cryptographic approach which is based on elliptic curve theory. ECC was introduced to minimize computational costs while providing equal and faster layers of security than other familiar operations (such as modular exponentiation) and with smaller keys. The technique of ECC has numerous applications in authentication protocols concerning RFIDs, digital signatures, wireless sensor networks, smart cards, and other authentication techniques. In this chapter, we describe the utilization of ECC for designing security protocols in terms of authentication, key establishment, signcryption, and secure group communication.

4.1 Introduction to ECC

Information security in any system is determined based on the basic CIA principles, which include confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In order to achieve these properties, a network needs three key functionalities such as data encryption, user authentication, and secure channel establishment [16]. These functionalities are interrelated and they use security keys with different perspectives. Typically, in encryption and decryption functions, the cryptographic operations are performed in two ways. In the first category, which is the symmetric key cryptography, the sender and the receiver ...