20 September 2007

Congratulations to Kealan McCusker who successfully defended his thesis and will be awarded the degree of PhD.

The title of Kealan's thesis is "Cryptographic key distribution in wireless sensor networks: a hardware perspective".

He completed his PhD in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) and the School of Electronic Engineering, DCU under the supervision of Dr. Noel E. O’Connor.

Kealan is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher with the CDVP.

Brief description of Project:

In this work the suitability of different methods of symmetric key distribution for application in wireless sensor networks are discussed. Each method is considered in terms of its security implications for the network. It is concluded that an asymmetric scheme is the optimum choice for key distribution. In particular, Identity-Based Cryptography (IBC) is proposed as the most suitable of the various asymmetric approaches. A protocol for key distribution using identity based Non-Interactive Key Distribution Scheme (NIKDS) and Identity-Based Signature scheme is presented. The protocol is analysed on the ARM920T processor and measurements were taken for the run time and energy of its components parts. It was found that the Tate pairing component of the NIKDS consumes significant amounts of energy, and so it should be ported to hardware. An accelerator was implemented in 65nm CMOS technology and area, timing and energy figures have been obtained for the design. Initial results indicate that a hardware implementation of IBC would meet the strict energy constraint of a wireless sensor network node.

This project was generously funded by Enterprise Ireland (EI) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

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