Novel key pre-distribution scheme in wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) usually consists of a large number of tiny sensors with limited computation capability, memory space and power resource. Many key pre-distribution techniques have been developed recently to establish pair wise keys between sensor nodes in WSN. Sensors are usually deployed for sensing data in the field. The communication of a wireless sensor network can be captured quite easily, thereby it requires security. To achieve security in wireless sensor network, key pre-distribution is essential. The key pre-distribution scheme makes use of symmetric matrices in order to establish a secret key between the sensor nodes. This scheme is known as Blom's scheme. It results in the establishment of a single key for communication between two sensor nodes. If it is captured by an adversary then the security is compromised, thus the resilience of the network is reduced. This scheme can be modified by making use of asymmetric matrices which generates two secret keys for two nodes. Thus two separate communication links are established between the nodes. If one of the communication links gets compromised by an adversary, there exists another link for secure communication between the nodes. Thus the resilience of the sensor network can be improved. Also in Blom's scheme Vandermonde matrix is used to generate private key but in this paper it is modified by using hankel matrix. The objective of this paper is to improve the resiliency of the network by generating the secret keys using asymmetric matrices.