A Light Weight Secure Communication Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The majority of security systems for wireless sensor networks are based on symmetric encryption. The main open issue for these approaches concerns the establishment of symmetric keys. A promising key distribution technique is the random pre-distribution of secret keys. Despite its effectiveness, this approach presents considerable memory overheads, in contrast with the limited resources of wireless sensor networks. A new scheme, called Seed based Min–Max Composite (S2MC), is proposed that exploits the best features of random pre-distribution with lower memory requirements and higher resilience. The novelty of the S2MC scheme lies in the organization of the secret material that uses the limited number of light weight pre-distributed seeds in a certain range and generating keys from the seeds during communication. The simulative analysis demonstrates that the introduced approach provides a higher level of security in terms of resilience than the existing schemes since the keys are erased after communication in the presence of compromised nodes.