A Key Predistribution Scheme for Sensor Networks Using Deployment Knowledge

Abstract

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt messages sent among sensor nodes. Keys for encryption purposes must be agreed upon by communicating nodes. Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is non-trivial. 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 be substantially improved with the use of our proposed scheme. The scheme and its detailed performance evaluation are presented in this paper.

A hierarchical key pre‐distribution scheme for fog networks

“…However, it fails to provide pair-wise authentication and requires significant communication overhead 13 . Several solutions based on 17 were subsequently proposed 34,35,36,37 . These latter schemes modified the random key pre-distribution scheme by increasing connectivity between nodes or decreasing storage overhead of sensor nodes.…”

GENDEP: Location-Aware Key Management for General Deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Previous location-aware approaches [2, 3, 5, 6] assume the uniform deployment model, where a sensing field is a flat area with a uniform geographical feature. In real world, however, a target sensing field is nonuniform.…”

“…In this section, we analyze the performance of G en D ep . We compare our method to the previous location-aware key management schemes based on the fixed deployment model, such as [5] and [2].…”

“…The key pool size of the scheme is 4880 to keep the faction of communication compromised under 0.4 until 50% nodes are compromised [1]. In order to keep the same level of key storage and to preserve the λ -secure property (for resilience against compromised sensor nodes, the key distribution schemes using the secret key matrix of the Blom scheme, such as and [2, 5], have an upper bound on the ratio of the number of sensor nodes and the size of secret matrix; this is called λ - secure property ; please refer to [3] for the λ -secure property) [3], ω=7 for all the schemes but τG=3, τD=2, and τE=1 for , -, and -, respectively. The analysis of key storage is described in Section 6.5.…”

“…Since Eschenauer and Gligor have introduced the first proposal [1], a variety of approaches have been studied for secure key management based on the key predistribution concept [2–7]. Among them, location-aware key management schemes [5–7] were remarkable in their efficiency in terms of computation and communication costs (Section 2.1).…”