Providing Sender Anonymity with Message Authentication in Sensor Networks using Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm

Message authentication is one of the important parameter used to avoid unauthorized accesses in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Because of its importance many authentication schemes were developed based on symmetric key cryptosystems and public key cryptosystems. But they all faced the challenge of high communication and computational overhead. To solve this problems authentication based on ECC was introduced. This authentication scheme is advantageous in terms of computational overhead, memory space utilization and security resilience. Our main aim is to minimize the total power consumption of the nodes in WSN and thereby to save the precious sensor energy. Hence an authentication scheme based on ECDSA was proposed in this paper which is a variant of ElGamal signature scheme recently proposed. This can be used to provide source anonymity along with message authentication. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is faster and generates smaller signature which adds to the advantage of the system.