An attack resistant key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Most of the key management schemes do not consider the attacking behavior of the adversary making such schemes less practical in real world. By knowing the adversarial behavior, several countermeasures against them can be effectively and efficiently designed by the defender/network designer. In this paper, we investigate the problem of node capture attack and propose a secure hybrid key predistribution scheme (HKP-HD) for wireless sensor networks (WSN). This scheme combines the robustness of the q-composite scheme with threshold resistant polynomial scheme. The proposed scheme aims to make the network more resistant against the node capture attacks. Adversary is assumed to be intelligent that tends to exploit different vulnerabilities present in network to build an attack matrix. It aims to destroy complete network with least number of nodes based on the attack matrix. As a countermeasure, the network designer constructs similar attack matrix based on the vulnerabilities in the network by considering sink as a major influencing factor. This matrix is used to calculate the attack coefficient of every node of the network that determines its probability of attack by the adversary. A hash chain based on maximum value of attack coefficient along with the multiple key pools is used to reduce the probability of the key compromise and communication overhead of the proposed scheme. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has reduced probability of key compromise, communication overhead and storage overhead as compared to other schemes.