Hybrid Design of Scalable Key Distribution for Wireless Sensor Networks

A Sensor Network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon of very close to it. The wireless communication employed by sensor network facilitates eavesdropping and packet injection by an adversary. Therefore security must be provided for sensor network to ensure secrecy of sensitive data. To achieve security, keys must be agreed upon by communication nodes. The main task is to safely distribute the shared keys to the sensor nodes. The solution to key distribution is such that, a pool of symmetric keys is chosen and a subset of the pool (key chain) is distributed to each sensor node. Two nodes that want to communicate search their key chain to determine whether they share a common key; if they don't share key in common then there may be a path, called key path, among these two nodes where each pair of neighboring nodes on this path have a key in common. This paper deals with hybrid design of key distribution which combines combinatorial approach and probabilistic approaches to select a key pool and key chain from the pool