A novel resilient multi-path establishment scheme for sensor networks

Abstract

With the development of Wireless sensor networks, secure communication among sensors by establishing pair-wise keys becomes a critical issue for many sensor network applications. Due to sensors' special uses, limited capabilities and declining connection probability, the random key pre-distribution schemes are no longer suitable for networks with large size. Multi-path key establishment scheme becomes a great addition to these existing schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel resilient establishment scheme for sensor networks. In our scheme, the sender sensor first partitions the pair-wise key into many sub-keys, and computes hash value of all sub-keys and products a hash checkout tree. It then transmits each sub-key and its hash path value via different node-disjoint paths. The receiver first checkouts the integrity of sub-keys by using hash path value, identifies faulty key establishment paths, and it then recovers the original pair-wise key. The salient features of the scheme are its flexibility of trading transmission, efficient checkout and low information disclosure. Resilience and information leaking analysis is conducted to show that the proposed scheme is agile and efficient compared with the existing schemes. The other nice feature of the proposed scheme is that the parameters of the scheme can be set up to meet the requirements for different sensor network applications.