An Enhanced Polynomial-Based Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Key establishment is a fundamental security issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN). It is the basis to establish the secure communication using cryptographic technologies between sensor nodes. Due to the current resource constraints on sensors, it is infeasible to use traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography or key distribution center based protocols. So the key predistribution schemes are paid most attention in key management of WSN. To establish pairwise keys securely and meanwhile prevent a number of compromised colluding nodes from breaking the pairwise key shared by any two innocent nodes, we propose an enhanced polynomial-based key establishment scheme (EPKES) for WSN. In EPKMS, we introduce an auxiliary set to improve the security level compared to previous schemes. The results of performance evaluations show that our proposed scheme has a good key connectivity, scalability, direct key establishment, resilience to nodes capture and storage consumption.