A Promising Pairwise Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Hostile Environments

Abstract

Key management in sensor networks is the core security protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the hostile environment. Due to the resource constraints, pre-distribution secrets keys into sensor nodes before they are deployment are an applicable approach. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in literature to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes. However, as the number of compromised nodes increases, the fraction of affected pairwise keys increase quickly. These vulnerabilities are exacerbated when WSNs have to operate unattended in a hostile environment. In such an environment, an adversary may control the network by capturing some sensor nodes.. To address these weaknesses, we present a promising pairwise key establishment scheme in this paper. In the proposed scheme, after pairwise key establishment all attackers can’t get any key information of uncompromised sensor nodes from compromised sensors. The analysis shows that compared with existing approaches, our scheme have better networks resilience against node capture attack.