A robust key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Key management is one of the most challenging security issues in wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are randomly deployed in a hostile territory However, due to the resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is nontrivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and public-key-based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Several exiting key management schemes have been proposed in literature to establish pairwise keys for wireless sensor networks, but they either can not offer strong resilience against node capture attacks or have overly large memory requirement to achieve high degree of connectivity. In this paper, we prose a novel pairwise key management scheme to enhancing the security. In the proposed scheme, part of keys in the key pool are computed by using hash function and the hash value are as new keys and put back into the key pool. Comparison to the existing approaches, this proposed scheme provides a stronger resilience against node capture attack.