Distributed Pairwise Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

- Security is a big challenge when wireless sensor networks are deployed in a hostile environment. Due to the computational and storage overheads, traditional asymmetric-key based security protocols are not suitable for the resource-constrained wireless sensors. Several symmetric-key distribution protocols have been proposed in literature to establish shared cryptographic keys between sensor nodes, but most of them only work for small-scale networks due to their linearly increased communication overhead and key storage overhead. Furthermore, existing protocols are not secure when the number of compromised nodes exceeds a threshold value. In this paper, we propose a new distributed pairwise key establishment method for large-scale wireless sensor networks. Compared with existing key distribution protocols, our scheme guarantees any two sensors to establish a pairwise key between them with low overheads. A high level network security also can be achieved in our scheme even a large number...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CSREAPSC
• Authors: Yi Cheng, Dharma P. Agrawal
• Keywords: CSREAPSC 2006, Emerging Technology, Storage Overhead, Wireless Sensor, Wireless Sensor Networks