An Efficient Self-Healing Key Distribution Scheme with Constant-Size Personal Keys for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The availability of group communications over inexpensive wireless networks has facilitated new types of applications and created new security challenges. One of the security challenges is how to securely distribute session keys over wireless networks. Self-healing key distribution mechanism is an ideal countermeasure for enabling session key distribution and recovery. In order to address the issue that personal keys could not be reused if more than a threshold number of nodes are revoked in self-healing key distribution schemes, a new self-healing key distribution scheme using bilinear pairings is proposed in this paper. Another motivation for developing this new scheme is to reduce computation cost in some existing ID-based self-healing key distribution schemes. The new scheme enables users to have constant size personal keys. The personal key of each user can be reused as long as it is not disclosed. Further, any coalition of non-authorized users can not recover the session keys. That is, the scheme is collusion-free secure. The ID-based scheme can support key management by mitigating the certificate management overload. Additional advantage includes sliding-window mechanism can be applied to our scheme such that it is unnecessary to determine the number of sessions during the Setup procedure.