Security in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Key Management Schemes

Wireless sensor networks pose new security and privacy challenges. One of the important challenges is how to bootstrap secure communications among nodes. Several key management schemes have been proposed. Key management plays an essential role in achieving security in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is nontrivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and publickey 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. In this paper, a new key pre-distribution scheme is proposed (DDHV SCHEME), which substantially improves the resilience of the network compared to the existing schemes (EG SCHEME). Our scheme exhibits a nice threshold property: when the number of compromised nodes is less than the threshold, the probability that any node other than these compromised nodes is affected is close to zero. This desirable property lowers the initial payoff of smaller scale network breaches to an adversary, and makes it necessary for the adversary to attack a significant proportion of the network.