Efficient pairwise key establishment and management in static wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Key establishment and management is the core of security protocols for wireless sensor networks deployed in the hostile environment. Due to the strict resource constraints, traditional asymmetric key cryptosystems, such as public/private key based schemes, are infeasible for large-scale wireless sensor networks. Research shows that pre-distributing pairwise keys into wireless sensor nodes before deployment is a practical way to deal with the key establishment problem. Existing random key based key pre-distribution schemes only provide probabilistic connectivity of the network and some level of network resilience. In this paper, we propose an efficient pairwise key establishment and management scheme to achieve both network connectivity and resilience for static wireless sensor networks. Compared with current key pre-distribution schemes, our scheme supports large network size, and has lower communication and computational overhead