Eficient schemes for key predistribution and shared-key discovery play a vital role in security and eficiency of pairwise key establishment an sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a scheme for key predistribution using hash-chain and subsequent shared-key discove y. We show potential active attacks on sensor networks due to key predistribution which can have severer consequences as compared to attucks described in existing proposals. We also show that as compared to the existing schemes, our scheme is more resilient to these active attacks.
In modern communication systems, a popular way of providing authentication in an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol is to sign the result of a one-way hash function (such as MD5) of a Diffie-Hellman public key. The security of such a protocol is based on the weakest of all the cryptographic assumptions of the algorithms involved: Diffie-Hellman key distribution, digital signature and a one-way hash function. If a protocol can be constructed using one cryptographic assumption, it would be at least as secure as that with multiple assumptions. The authors propose three authenticated Diffie-Hellman key-agreement protocols, each of which is based on one cryptographic assumption. In particular, the first protocol is based on a discrete logarithm, the second on an elliptic curve and the third on RSA factoring. The main objective of the paper is to show that the security of a protocol should be assessed at the protocol level as a whole, rather than at the level of individual algorithms that are used to build the protocol.
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