The Energy Cost of Secrets in Ad-hoc Networks (Short Paper)
Alireza Hodjat, Ingrid M.R. Verbauwhede · 2002
Energy consumption of cryptographic algorithms and security protocols is a crucial factor in wireless ad-hoc networks. This work explores the energy cost of a key agreement process between two parties of an ad-hoc network using public-key encryption techniques and compares the results with regular networks which use secret-key based key-exchange protocols. Elliptic Curve public-key and Rijndael AES secret-key algorithms are chosen to explore the energy cost of Diffie-Hellman and Kerberos key agreement protocols on a WINS sensor network. The results show that the total energy cost of the Diffie-Hellman key agreement process using Elliptic Curve point-multiplication in an ad-hoc network is between one to two orders of magnitude larger than the key exchange process based on the AES secret-key algorithm in a regular non ad-hoc network. 1.