Tin-Key: Effective Key-Establishment for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), pairwise key establishment between two sensor nodes is important. Public key cryptography based key establishment mechanisms are not suitable for WSN, due to their more energy consumption and complex hardware requirements. On the other hand, a different class of key establishment scheme that stores key or key related information are computationally efficient, but, demands huge storage space at each sensor node. Most of the existing symmetric cryptography based key establishment mechanisms use the on-line TTP server which could be a bottleneck results in denial of services attacks. This paper proposes a symmetric key cryptography based shared key establishment technique efficiently tailored towards the wireless sensor networks addressing all these issues. The proposed scheme places the TTP server off-line and requires a (constant) small storage at each sensor node. Moreover, the scheme efficiently supports for adding or deleting nodes after the initial deployment.