Implementation and Evaluation of BSD Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Security is recently arising as an important issue for the Internet of Things (IoT). Efficient ways to provide secure communication between devices and sensors is crucial for the IoT devices, which are becoming more and more used and spread in a variety of fields. In this context, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is considered as a strong candidate to provide security while being able to be functional in an environment with strong requirements and limitations such as wireless sensor networks (WSN). The solutions used need to be efficient for devices that have some important restrictions on memory availability and battery life. In this master thesis we present a lightweight BSD-based implementation of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for the Contiki OS and its evaluation. We show the feasibility of the implementation and use of this cryptography in the IoT by a thorough evaluation of the solution by analyzing the performance using different implementations and optimizations of the used algorithms, and also by evaluating it in a real hardware environment. The evaluation of ECC shows that it can adapt to the upcoming challenges, thanks to the level of security that it provides with a smaller size of keys when compared to other legacy cryptography schemes.