Mutual Entity Authentication Protocol Based on ECDSA for WSN

Digital Signatures are primarily employed to achieve data integrity, data origin authentication and non-repudiation. In comparison to RSA-based digital signatures, the ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography) based Signature schemes like ECDSA (Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) are more efficient and suited for a resource-constrained network like WSN. In a WSN, proper entity authentication is to be achieved before the sensor data is exchanged. The use of ECDSA is not suitable for achieving mutual authentication between the entities like the base station, cluster heads and nodes. Based on the study of ECDSA, the paper designs a mutual authentication protocol with the help of a computationally low signature scheme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first digital signature based scheme which achieves mutual entity authentication. The paper also brings out performance parameters of the developed protocol.