A High Connectivity Pre-Distribution Key Management Scheme in Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Key management is a decisive part for security in 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 number of sensor node is huge. Recently, a random key pre-distribution scheme is proposed as an efficient solution for sharing keys among sensor nodes to reduce the length of shared key and avoid unnecessary key assignments. By studying the range of the communication signal in sensor nodes, we can improve the pre-distribution key mechanism, thus get a higher connectivity possibility between sensor nodes in the whole network. In this paper, we present a grid-based scheme with novel approach for key-distribution mechanism based on the communication range of sensor nodes that guarantees a high probability of sharing keys between sensor nodes. Our evaluation and simulation show that our approach outperforms the existing schemes in both high connectivity probability and low memory usage. Among security issues, key management is one of the most important factors and it has been highly studied recently. There are some type of key agreement schemes, such as trusted-server scheme, self-enforcing scheme and key pre-distribution scheme. However, no trusted infrastructure of WSN and limited computation and energy resources make two former schemes unsuitable for WSN. In this paper we propose a new grid-based mechanism for pre-distribution with respect to the communication range of sensor nodes. Communication range should be studied to avoid unnecessary key assignments because if two nodes are not in their communication ranges, it is unnecessary to store the common keys. Correspondingly, the probability of sharing keys should be different depending on the communication range of the node. The key sharing of our proposed scheme consists of three steps, namely generation of a large pool of P keys; random drawing m keys out of P to establish key ring of a sensor (sensor A); establishing key ring for neighbor nodes of A by random selecting k keys from m keys of A and (m-k) keys from the key pool P. These three steps are repeated until it covers the entire network. They will be thoroughly discussed in the following sections. + 1 Corresponding author: Dugki Min (dkmin@konkuk.ac.kr) International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology 2008 978-0-7695-3328-5/08 $25.00

Efficient and Secure Key Distribution Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Grid-based schemes address a WSN of size n as an matrix or grid. In this subcategory, each node in the WSN is assigned to a unique intersection in the grid [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. An early example was called Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks (PIKE) [ 26 ].…”

A Key Distribution Scheme for WSN Based on Hash Chains and Deployment Knowledge

“…This solution made up the shortcomings of the scheme given in [7], but it also reduced the node's local connection probability. Because the nodes within the same region will more likely 2 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks become their adjacent nodes than the nodes deployed in different regions do, some improved pairwise key distribution schemes were proposed based on the deployment knowledge in [9][10][11]. These schemes had a relative balance between the local connection probability and the security.…”