Securing is becoming a necessity for wireless devices but it is worthwhile to enumerate the benefits of security:
- The identity of devices can be established with secure methods.
- The devices can secure the identity of their correspondent.
- This is useful in control applications and for access control.
- Signatures on data is useful for firmware upgrade and system reconfiguration.
- Devices can check the integrity of their boot code
Confidentiality of data can be assured: e.g sensor data, network control data.
The object of this paper is to outline how these benefits can be implemented, and what is required to do this.
We will consider the appropriate cryptographic algorithms. The next two sections will provide a practical summary of symmetric (shared) key and asymmetric key (public key) cryptographic algorithms.
