Abstract
This paper contributes to the challenging field of security for wireless sensor networks by introducing a key agreement scheme in which sensor nodes create secure radio connections with their neighbours depending on the aid of third parties. These third parties are responsible only for the pair-wise key establishment among sensor nodes, so they do not observe the physical phenomenon nor route data packets to other nodes. The proposed method is explained here with respect to four important issues: how secret shares are distributed, how local neighbours are discovered, how legitimate third parties are verified, and how secure channels are established. Moreover, the performance of the scheme is analyzed with regards to five metrics: local connectivity, resistance to node capture, memory usage, communication overhead, and computational burden. Our scheme not only secures the transmission channels of nodes but also guarantees high local connectivity of the sensor network, low usage of memory resources, perfect network resilience against node capture, and complete prevention against impersonation attacks. As it is demonstrated in this paper, using a number of third parties equals to 10% of the total number of sensor nodes in the area of interest, the proposed method can achieve at least 99.42% local connectivity with a very low usage of available storage resources (less than 385 bits on each sensor node).
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks are employed in a wide range of applications including disaster relief operations, forest-fire detection, battlefield surveillance, pollution measurement, and healthcare applications
We propose in this work a scalable and efficient key agreement method in which both third parties and sensor nodes use a small number of memory units in the key establishment step
This paper focuses on the issue of key establishment for wireless sensor networks in which nodes and third parties are uniformly deployed in the field of interest
Summary
Wireless sensor networks are employed in a wide range of applications including disaster relief operations, forest-fire detection, battlefield surveillance, pollution measurement, and healthcare applications. Because of the characteristics of these applications as well as the broadcast nature of the radio transmissions, a wireless sensor network is more vulnerable to security threats than traditional wireless networks. In order to protect the sensor network from outside attacks, it is necessary to implement a cryptographic mechanism that can achieve three major security objectives: confidentiality, integrity and authentication. Even though the topic of cryptography has been well studied for traditional networks, many conventional cryptographic approaches cannot be applied to sensor networks [1]. It is important to propose cryptographic solutions designed for wireless sensor networks
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