Using Auxiliary Sensors for Pairwise Key Establishment in WSN

Abstract

Abstract. Many techniques have been developed recently for establishing pairwise keys in sensor networks. However, they are either vulnerable to a few number of compromised sensor nodes or involve expensive protocols for establishing keys. This paper introduces a much better alternative for achieving high resilience to node compromises and high efficiency in key establishment. The main idea is to deploy additional sensor nodes, called assisting nodes, to help the key establishment between sensor nodes. The proposed approach has many advantages over existing approaches. In this approach, a sensor node only needs to make a few local contacts and perform a few hash operations to setup a key with any other sensor node in the network at a very high probability. The majority of sensor nodes only need to store a single key in their memory space. Besides these benefits, it still provides high resilience to node compromises. The implementation of this approach on TelosB motes also demonstrates its feasibility for pairwise key establishment in sensor networks.

Resilient key establishment for mobile sensor networks

“…The scheme can only tolerate mildly-mobile networks and does not work for highly mobile scenarios. The scheme proposed in [6] makes use of assistant nodes which distribute keys to nodes. The scheme works for MWSNs as well, but the number of assistant nodes needed to achieve high connectivity is very high.…”

“…The scheme works for MWSNs as well, but the number of assistant nodes needed to achieve high connectivity is very high. All of these schemes [4][5][6] are mainly designed for static WSNs and their applicability for MWSNs is shown in a perfunctory way without formal analyses or simulations. Other than these schemes, Zhang et al [20] proposed a pairwise key predistribution scheme based on random perturbation of polynomials.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, there are only a few proposals in the literature [4][5][6], which superficially mention suitability for Mobile WSNs (MWSN), but without an analysis. Moreover, specific characteristics of mobility must be taken into account while designing a scheme, which is missing in the existing This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBITAK) under grant 110E180.…”

Distributed key management for wireless sensor networks

“…Some of current works in this field also proposed to use "Auxiliary Sensors" [8] for key establishment. Auxiliary sensors are dedicated for key management in those are easily accessible schemes.…”

“…Moreover they have more resources than main sensor nodes. Hence a lot of resources are wasted [8]. Still in another approach Key Distribution Centre is used.…”