Abstract
Sensor networks technology has shown to be of great value for a whole range of wireless applications. Nonetheless, according to experts, the great revolution is still to come, when wireless sensor networks (WSN) will form part of hundreds of standard of living real-world applications. Thus, future of this technology seems to be more than promising. Representative security problems from typical wireless networks have needed much extra effort from researchers when facing the constrained nature of the sensor platforms and, in fact, other new and specific security issues still need to be worked out. Precisely, because the limited features of WSN, solutions based on symmetric cryptography have been primarily used by the scientific community so far, while solutions based on public-key cryptography have been traditionally considered too expensive. In this paper, we firstly overview WSN technology and applications. Then, we focus on the security issues by analyzing the use of symmetric cryptography in contrast with public-key cryptography, and the important role that elliptic curve cryptography is playing in this field. Finally, we put into perspective some important results obtained by different authors during the last couple of years and that all together demonstrate, in our opinion, that there is an important space for public-key technology-based solutions in WSN applications.