A Random Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The establishment of shared keys between communicating neighbor nodes in wireless sensor networks is a challenge due to resource-constrained sensor networks. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in literatures to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes. However, many of them are either too complicated to fit for wireless sensor networks or insecure for some common aggressions. In this paper, we propose a random key management scheme based on random key pre-distribution for wireless sensor networks. To achieve better performance and security, the proposed scheme employs two different phases to establish enhanced pairwise keys between neighboring nodes. Compared with other existing random key pre-distribution schemes, our scheme has better resilience against node capture and also performs better in terms of network connectivity and scalability with appropriate memory, computation and communication overheads.