A key pre-distribution scheme using deployment knowledge for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks pose security and privacy challenges. One challenge is how to bootstrap secure communications among nodes. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed, however, they either have a high memory requirement for large networks or need a large transmission range to achieve the desired connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel key pre-distribution scheme using deployment knowledge. In our scheme, sensor field is divided into multiple hexagonal grids and nodes are divided into groups, each of which is deployed into a grid. By using deployment knowledge, we can drastically reduce the number of potential groups from which neighbors of each node may come. Thus, a pair-wise key can be generated efficiently for each pair of neighbors. Compared to existing schemes, our scheme achieves a high connectivity with a lower memory requirement and a smaller transmission range and outperforms others in resilience against node capture attacks.