Cryptanalysis of Pseudorandom Number Generators in Wireless Sensor Networks

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This work presents a brute-force attack on an elliptic curve cryptosystemimplemented on UC Berkley’s TinyOS operating system for wireless sensor networks.The attack exploits the short period of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) usedby the cryptosystem to generate private keys. The attack assumes a laptop is listeningpromiscuously to network traffic for key messages and requires only the sensor node'spublic key and network address to discover the private key. Experimental results showthat roughly 50% of the address space leads to a private key compromise in 25 minuteson average.