Key Pre-distribution Protocol Research Articles

On the Impact of Deployment Errors in Location-Based Key Predistribution Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

On the Impact of Deployment Errors in Location-Based Key Predistribution Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Multi-party pairwise key agreement in linear number of Diffie–Hellman key exchanges

We consider a classical problem of multi-party pairwise key agreement (MP-KA): n parties wish to establish a secure communication channels to each other. Currently, this problem is easily solved with involvement of a trusted Key Distribution Center (KDC) or Key Translation Center (KTC), public key encryption or key pre-distribution protocols. But these solutions are not applicable when some parties are corrupted and all of them have only a link to the Certificate Verification Center (CVC). We develop MP-KA protocol without Trusted Setup and involvement of KDC or KTC, which reduces the number $$(n(n-1))/2$$ of Diffie–Hellman key exchanges (DH-KE). Precisely, for an adversary, who corrupts no more then t-out-of-n parties, $$t \le [n/2]-1$$ , we reduce this number to $$(n-t-1)\cdot (t+1)$$ , and thus to O(n) for the constant value of t. Our protocol consists of two phases: (1) $$k = (n-t-1)\cdot (t+1)$$ DH-KE runs to establish secure channels between a subset of all parties and (2) a protocol based on secret sharing, intended to agree on pairwise keys between other parties. We prove that the second phase of protocol is perfectly secure against semi-honest threshold adversary. As a result, we improve the efficiency of multi-party pairwise key agreement in comparison with direct Diffie–Hellman-based approach.

Reliable and secure data communication in wireless sensor networks using optimal locally recoverable codes

Networks consisting of wireless sensors are extensively used in many applications. Decentralized Erasure Codes (DEC) were introduced to store the sensed data in the wireless sensor network itself before transmitting the sensed data from wireless nodes to gateway or query nodes. Data at the failed nodes can be reconstructed by accessing other nodes in the network in DEC setup. In a traditional DEC setup, it is required to access k nodes out of n nodes to reconstruct the data at the failed node. Also, the reconstruction at failed node is subjected to intruder attacks raising security concerns. To reduce the number of nodes required to reconstruct the data at failed nodes and to ensure communication security, in this paper, decentralized erasure codes were constructed from optimal locally recoverable codes and Blom’s key pre-distribution protocol, which exploits the generator matrix nature of constructed code, was implemented. From the simulations, we can infer that the proposed scheme performs better than other existing methods that use Reed–Solomon codes in terms of network load and error count per sent packet. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed scheme ensures secure and efficient communication between nodes to overcome intruder interference.

Performance Evaluation of Polynomial Pool-Based Key Pre-Distribution Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network Applications

In nowadays, wireless sensor network (WSN) has been established as a leading emerging technology in the field of remote area distributed sensing due to its diverse application areas. Key pre-distribution is an important task in WSN because after the deployment of sensor nodes, their neighbors become strange to each other. To secure the communication, neighbor nodes have to generate a secret shared key, or a key-path must exist between these nodes. In this paper, we have discussed and presented various key pre-distribution protocols, namely, the polynomial pool-based key pre-distribution which is a scheme for creating pairwise keys between sensors on the foundation of a polynomial-based key pre-distribution protocol, introducing two effective instantiations: a random subset assignment key pre-distribution scheme and a grid-based key pre-distribution scheme. Other studied key pre-distribution schemes (KPDS) are Peer Intermediaries Key for Establishment (PIKE) and Group-based key pre-distribution scheme. The performances of these schemes have been assessed through the simulation of different grids under the TinyOS environment.

Optimization of key predistribution protocol based on supernetworks theory in heterogeneous WSN

This work develops an equilibrium model for finding the optimal distribution strategy to maximize performance of key predistribution protocols in terms of cost, resilience, connectivity, and lifetime. As an essential attribute of wireless sensor networks, heterogeneity and its impacts on random key predistribution protocols are first discussed. Using supernetworks theory, the optimal node deployment model is proposed and illustrated. In order to find the equilibrium performance of our model, all optimal performance functions are changed into variational inequalities so that this optimization problem can be solved. A small-scale example is presented to illustrate the applicability of our model.

Application of Modulo Key-Predistribution Protocol

The aim of the study is to analyze the application of the Modulo Key Pre-Distribution (MKPD) protocol which is developed for Wireless sensor network (WSN). WSN is a collection of a large number of sensor nodes with limited resources. Bootstrapping secure communication among sensor nodes deployed in hostile environment is an important and challenging problem. An adversary may physically capture some sensors to compromise their stored sensitive data and secret keys which are used to attain confidentiality of the sensitive data. A common approach to solve problem is to use a key pre-distribution scheme in which each sensor node is assigned a subset of keys (key chain), selected from key pool prior to deployment. The keys are carefully selected that have high key sharing probability and resistance against node capture. We use deterministic key distribution scheme based on modulo function to establish the pair-wise keys among the sensor nodes. This study focuses on the application of this Modulo Key Pre-Distribution (MKPD) protocol to a group communication. It provides good key connectivity between the sensor nodes belongs to that group. And also opportunity available to increase the scalability in MKPD protocol by complementary design is also explained.

Scaling Laws of Key Predistribution Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Many key predistribution (KP) protocols have been proposed and are well accepted in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Being distributed and localized, they are perceived to be scalable as node density and network dimension increase. While it is true in terms of communication/computation overhead, their scalability in terms of security performance is unclear. In this paper, we conduct a detailed study on this issue. In particular, we define a new metric called Resilient Connectivity (RC) to quantify security performance in WSNs. We then conduct a detailed analytical investigation on how KP protocols scale with respect to node density and network dimension in terms of RC in randomly deployed WSNs. Based on our theoretical analysis, we state two scaling laws of KP protocols. Our first scaling law states that KP protocols are not scalable in terms of RC with respect to node density. Our second scaling law states that KP protocols are not scalable in terms of RC with respect to network dimension. In order to deal with the unscalability of the above two scaling laws, we further propose logical and physical group deployment, respectively. We validate our findings further using extensive theoretical analysis and simulations.

Improved Pre-distribution key management scheme for WSN

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) was usually vulnerable to conspiracy attack from its adversaries when using bivariate polynomial key pre-distribution protocol. In order to solve this problem,a pre-distribution key management scheme for WSN was improved by reducing the amount of pairwise keys sharing between sensor nodes and changing the means of establishing pairwise keys between clusters. Analysis shows that the improved scheme not only maintains the advantages such as higher security of the original scheme,but also saves the limited memory storage of sensor nodes further,reduces the communication overhead of sensor nodes,extends the lifespan of the networks and can withstand conspiracy attack effectively.

LKE: A Self-Configuring Scheme for Location-Aware Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Symmetric key agreement is significant to security provisioning in sensor networks with resource limitations. A number of pairwise key pre-distribution protocols have been proposed, but their scalability is often constrained by the conflict between the desired probability of sharing keys between neighboring nodes and the resilience against node capture attacks under a given budget for storing keying information within each sensor. In this paper, we propose LKE, a self-configuring in-situ key establishment scheme targeting large-scale sensor networks. LKE employs location information for a deterministic key space generation and keying information distribution. For uniformly distributed networks, LKE exhibits strong resilience against node capture attacks and achieves a high key-sharing probability (close to 1) at the expense of a small amount of memory overhead. An improvement over LKE, termed as iLKE, is also proposed. iLKE is topology-adaptive, and therefore works well for both uniform and non-uniform network models. We conduct both theoretic analysis and simulation study to evaluate the performances of LKE and iLKE.

Network Decoupling: A Methodology for Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

—Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications demand secure communications. The random key predistribution protocol has been well accepted in achieving secure communications in WSNs. A host of key management protocols have been proposed based on the protocol. However, due to the randomness in key distribution and strong constraint in key path construction, the protocols can only be applied in highly dense networks, which are not always feasible in practice. In this paper, we propose a methodology called to address this problem. With this methodology, a WSN is decoupled into a and a , which significantly releases the constraint in key path construction of the protocol. We design two new key management protocols, that is, and , as well as a set of link and path dependency elimination rules in decoupled sensor networks. Our analytical and simulation data demonstrate the performance enhancement of our solutions from the perspective of connectivity and resilience and its applicability in nonhighly dense sensor networks.