Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cryptanalysis Of Pseudorandom Number Generators In Wireless Sensor Networks, Kevin M. Finnigin

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents a brute-force attack on an elliptic curve cryptosystem implemented on UC Berkley's TinyOS operating system for wireless sensor networks. The attack exploits the short period of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) used by the cryptosystem to generate private keys. The attack assumes a laptop is listening promiscuously to network traffic for key messages and requires only the sensor node?s public key and network address to discover the private key. Experimental results show that roughly 50% of the address space leads to a private key compromise in 25 minutes on average. Furthermore, approximately 32% of the address space …