A key management scheme for wireless sensor networks using deployment knowledge

TLDR

Wireless sensor networks need secure message encryption, yet key agreement is difficult because of resource constraints and existing schemes such as Diffie‑Hellman or full pre‑distribution are unsuitable. The authors propose a novel random key pre‑distribution scheme that exploits deployment knowledge to avoid unnecessary key assignments. The scheme and its detailed performance evaluation are presented in this paper. The proposed scheme substantially improves connectivity, memory usage, and resilience against node capture.

Abstract

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to he able to encrypt messages sent among sensor nodes. Keys for encryption purposes must he agreed upon by communicating nodes. Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is nontrivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and public-key based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Pre-distribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of memory used when the network size is large. Recently, a random key pre-distribution scheme and its improvements have been proposed. A common assumption made by these random key pre-distribution schemes is that no deployment knowledge is available. Noticing that in many practical scenarios, certain deployment knowledge may be available a priori, we propose a novel random key pre-distribution scheme that exploits deployment knowledge and avoids unnecessary key assignments. We show that the performance (including connectivity, memory usage, and network resilience against node capture) of sensor networks can he substantially improved with the use of our proposed scheme. The scheme and its detailed performance evaluation are presented in this paper.