A novel key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks based on hexagon deployment model

Abstract

Key management is a fundamental security service in wireless sensor networks, which provides essential supports for other security services, such as encryption and authentication. Due to resource constrains as well as vulnerable to physical capture of sensor nodes, establishing pairwise keys in wireless sensor networks is not trivial task. Compared with traditional public key cryptography, symmetric key cryptography with key predistribution mechanism is more suitable for wireless sensor networks. However, most of previous solutions still have some issues on performance and security capabilities. In order to make further improvements, especially on resilience of node capture, in this paper, we present a novel key predistribution scheme based on hexagon grid deployment model by combining bivariate polynomials and node expected deployment knowledge. This scheme first classifies the whole sensor nodes into two kinds according to their IDs, and then preloads different kind of sensor nodes in each hexagon grid with their individual corresponding bivariate polynomial shares. Analysis and simulations show that our scheme has a better resilience to node capture attacks with the same memory cost compared with prior schemes, while possessing a high probability of direct key establishment and low communication overhead.