Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-02020-z ORIGINAL RESEARCH Security protocol using elliptic curve cryptography algorithm for wireless sensor networks Rosheen Qazi 1  · Kashif Naseer Qureshi 1,2  · Faisal Bashir 1,2  · Najam Ul Islam 1,2  · Saleem Iqbal 3  · Arsalan Arshad 1,2 Received: 25 August 2019 / Accepted: 18 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Information security broadly refers to the state of protection against unsanctioned access to information or data, principally electronic or digital data. In today’s world of modern technology, there is a need to design and develop security measures to protect information from various security risks and threats. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) hold signifcant importance in this era of the technological world; as its wide range of applications are being used around the globe in almost every domain. WSNs are being deployed with several constraints and limitations, due to which deploying security mechanisms on such networks becomes a difcult task for the developers. This research work specifcally targeted security issues in WSNs and hence subjected to provide authentication and data encryption in a novel manner for node-to-node communication. The proposed scheme not only provides security for the node to node communication network but also hoards memory space on nodes with the help of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) cryptographic scheme to provide an appropriate mecha- nism for measuring key generation time, count of hello message and packet size. Furthermore, the Algorithm for Wireless Secure Communication (ASCW) also provides key management with acceptable key length. In addition to this, ASCW helps in securing the communication on node level which helps in securing the whole network in a better and efcient manner. ASCW also reduces the cost of risk and security threats on the network with the help of authentication mechanism. A physi- cal testbed has designed based on devices and sensor motes according to the required specifcations. The proposed solutions have evaluated in terms of key generation time, several hello message and size of data packets. Experimental results have indicated that ASCW is one of the suitable and a novel approach for securing data on nodes during communication in WSNs. Keywords WSN · Security · Elliptic curve digital signature · Key management · Cryptography 1 Introduction The networks with no infrastructure and self-confgurations are known as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), these networks observe diferent physical or environmental conditions like temperature, vibration pressure, area monitoring, transporta- tion, environmental sensing, military applications, structural monitoring, industrial monitoring and agricultural monitoring. (Qureshi and Abdullah 2014; Qureshi et al. 2020; Yetgin et al. 2017). These networks are being commonly used nowadays for automating the networks and provides cost-efective, easy to deploy with less overhead solutions. The sensor nodes are connected to the gateway nodes which are linked to a base sta- tion or central processing systems. Besides, the sensor nodes have limited resources including processing speed, limited communication bandwidth, and limited storage capacity. How- ever, with various positive features, these networks have been sufered from serious security challenges due to open sensor nodes deployment which provokes and open gates for several kinds of physical security attacks. The several changes and certain limitations in WSNs make it vulnerable to diferent security challenges. To cater these security challenges there is a need to develop secure and protected protocols for securing the data communication in WSN (Aliero et al. 2020; Kumar et al. 2014; Qureshi et al. 2018). There are many diferent factors which makes security a difcult challenge for WSNs, one of the factor is the broadcast nature of nodes, i.e. sensor * Kashif Naseer Qureshi kashifnq@gmail.com 1 Department of Computer Science, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan 2 Cyber Reconnaissance and Combat Lab, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan 3 University Institute of Information Technology (UIIT) PMAS, Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan