TinyIBAK: Design and Prototype Implementation of An Identity-based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Large Scale Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an authenticated key agreement scheme, TinyIBAK, based on the identity-based cryptography and bilinear paring, for large scale sensor networks. We prove the security of our proposal in the random oracle model. According to the formal security validation using AVISPA, the proposed scheme is strongly secure against the passive and active attacks, such as replay, man-in-the middle and node compromise attacks, etc. We implemented our proposal for TinyOS-2.1, analyzed the memory occupation, and evaluated the time and energy performance on the MICAz motes using the Avrora toolkits. Moreover, we deployed our proposal within the TOSSIM simulation framework, and investigated the effect of node density on the performance of our scheme. Experimental results indicate that our proposal consumes an acceptable amount of resources, and is feasible for infrequent key distribution and rekeying in large scale sensor networks. Compared with other ID-based key agreement approaches, TinyIBAK is much more efficient or comparable in performance but provides rekeying. Compared with the traditional key pre-distribution schemes, TinyIBAK achieves significant improvements in terms of security strength, key connectivity, scalability, communication and storage overhead, and enables efficient secure rekeying.