Comparison of RSA-Threshold Cryptography and ECC-Threshold Cryptography for Small Mobile Adhoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network is a special type of wireless network in which a collection of mobile hosts with wireless network interfaces may form a temporary network. Without the aid of proper fixed infrastructure, providing secure communications is a big challenge. The strength of the security solutions very much depends on the cryptographic keys used for communication. Efficient key management is an important requirement of such networks. For networks like MANET which are basically constrained networks with minimum resources, identification of suitable asymmetric cryptosystem is a vital one. Hence an attempt has been made in this paper to identity a suitable asymmetric-threshold based cryptosystems for small MANETs. The study focuses on the comparison of Rivest Shamir Adelman-Threshold Cryptography and Elliptic Curve Cryptography Threshold Cryptography in terms of the performance parameters like key generation time, Encryption time, Decryption time and communication cost. Different small network scenarios with variable node sizes and key sizes are experimented and the results show that ECC-TC is the most desirable asymmetric-threshold cryptosystem for small MANET.