A Hybrid Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

To establish pairwise keys for each pair of neighboring sensor nodes is a basic service, forming the basis other security services, such as authentication and encrypted in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, due to constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of sensor nodes to establish the pairwise key is challenging task. Here, a combination of polynomial pool-based and the probabilistic key predistribution scheme for WSN is presented. In the proposed scheme part of sensor nodes are pre-loaded polynomial shares, and the polynomial shares are used to compute the keys which make up a key pool. And the rest of sensor nodes are preloaded the keys selected from this key pool. The proposed scheme is analyzed based on connectivity, resistance against attacks, memory consumption and communication overhead. And the simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of network resilience to node capture compared to the existing schemes.