Performance analysis of multivariate cryptosystem schemes for wireless sensor network

In a wireless sensor networks (WSN), large numbers of tiny sensor devices observe their environment and communicate the observation to a sink. Security is vital to avoid false reporting, safety of sensors and sensed objects. In particular, message authentication is crucial to prevent false response that may be evoked by a message. This necessitates a strong cryptographic mechanism to ensure safety. However, existing resource intensive cryptographic mechanisms are can affect the performance and lifetime of a WSN adversely. To address this problem of security in resource limited WSN, multivariate cryptosystem schemes are proposed and evaluated in this paper. The viability of different multivariate cryptosystems have been analyzed on the anvil of computation and memory requirements. Simulation results show that multivariate cryptosystem require small computation time and low memory that make them viable for security provisioning in a WSN. Results also show that the throughput of the network is large with low average delay even with large number of sensor nodes.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slideHighlights► Multivariate cryptosystem are compared with ECDSA on the anvil of memory. ► Rainbow multivariate signature scheme was found to be viable one for WSN. ► Due to the small key size, it results lowest computational power and less storage overheads.