Fast authenticated key establishment protocols for self-organizing sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider efficient authenticated key establishment protocols between a sensor and a security manager in a self-organizing sensor network. We propose a hybrid authenticated key establishment scheme, which exploits the difference in capabilities between security managers and sensors, and put the cryptographic burden where the resources are less constrained. The hybrid scheme reduces the high cost public-key operations at the sensor side and replaces them with efficient symmetric-key based operations. Meanwhile, the scheme authenticates the two identities based on public-key certificates to avoid the typical key management problem in pure symmetric-key based protocols and maintain a good amount of scalability. The proposed scheme can be efficiently implemented on Mitsubishi's M16C microprocessor in 5.2Kbyte code/data size, and achieve a total processing time of 760 ms on sensor side, which is better than all the other public-key based key establishment protocols we have studied. We also present its modified version with a faster speed but more communication overhead.