Key Chain-Based Key Predistribution Protocols for Securing Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Since the conception of the seminal work proposed by Eschenauer and Gligor in 2002, several key predistribution mechanisms have been proposed in the literature in order to establish symmetric secret keys between any two neighbor sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for secure communication. However, due to lack of prior deployment knowledge, limited resources of sensor nodes and security threats posed in the unattended environment of WSNs, it is always a challenging task to propose a better secure key predistribution scheme apart from existing schemes. In this paper, we aim to propose two new key predistribution schemes based on hashed key chains, which provide secure communication between the sensor nodes with the desired storage and communication overheads. The proposed schemes provide better tradeoff among security, network connectivity, and overheads as compared to those for other existing schemes.