An unconditionally secure location-aware key management scheme for static sensor networks

Abstract

Location-adaptive key establishment schemes may or may not start with prior knowledge of the deployed sensor nodes, but they adapt to the geography of the deployment field (target field) in a sensor network. On the other hand, location-aware schemes use prior knowledge of the deployed sensor nodes of some target field in a sensor network. Such location-aware schemes improve substantially higher network connectivity and resilience against node captures if the deployment error between the actual and expected locations of the deployed sensor nodes is smaller. In this paper, we present a new location-aware key pre-distribution scheme in static sensor networks based on an existing polynomial-based key pre-distribution scheme proposed by Blundo et al. Our scheme makes use of the shares of symmetric bivariate polynomials over a finite field in order to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes. Our scheme always guarantees that no matter how many nodes are captured in the network, the non-compromised nodes can still communicate between them with 100% secrecy. As a result, our scheme provides unconditionally security against sensor node capture attack, that is, our scheme is perfectly secure against sensor node capture attack. Moreover, it provides a better trade-off among network connectivity, communication overhead, computational overhead, storage requirement and security against node capture compared to those for the existing schemes. It also supports the addition of new sensor nodes after the initial deployment of sensor nodes.