A mutual-healing key distribution scheme in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

How to establish secure session keys is one of the central tasks for wireless sensor network communications. General key distribution schemes for traditional computer networks could not be directly shifted to wireless sensor network environments as broadcast messages may be lost due to sensor network internal factors or external attacks. Self-healing key distribution schemes, therefore, have been proposed to address packet loss issues since 2002. The essential issue that self-healing key distribution mechanism addressed is the fixed-number of broadcast messages (excluding the last broadcast message) loss. In other words, a node could not recover its new session keys if a node has missed more than a fixed number broadcast messages or the last broadcast message in a self-healing key distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks. This paper aims to address this emerged issue and provide a new key distribution scheme: mutual-healing key distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks. This mutual-healing key distribution can enable a node in a wireless sensor network to recover its new session key although its last broadcast message was lost. A formal definition for mutual-healing key distribution will also be proposed in this paper. The proposed mutual-healing key distribution scheme is based on bilinear pairings. The scheme is collusion-free for any coalition of non-authorized nodes. Each node's private key has nothing to do with the number of revoked nodes and can be reused as long as it is not disclosed. The storage overhead for each node is a constant.