A New Design of Efficient Key Pre-distribution Scheme for Secure Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Sensor networks are widely used for applications such as environmental monitoring, airports safety, health care, etc. Owing to the property of sensor devices, the sensor networks are easily compromised by an attacker who sends forged or modified messages. Therefore, the security is very important in the sensor networks. However, the traditional asymmetric cryptography such as Diffie-Hellman key agreement or RSA cryptography system are impractical for the sensor network due to limited computation, energy resources of sensor nodes, and network dynamics, etc. This paper will present a new efficient key pre-distribution scheme for secure wireless sensor network. It provides that any pair of sensor nodes can find a common secret key between them with simple calculation. Compared with previous proposed key pre-distribution schemes, the proposed method could significantly improve the performance and energy efficiency of the sensor nodes. It is very suitable for the sensor nodes that are limited in power, computational capacities, and memory.