A Highly Scalable Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Given the sensitivity of the potential WSN applications and because of resource limitations, key management emerges as a challenging issue for WSNs. One of the main concerns when designing a key management scheme is the network scalability. Indeed, the protocol should support a large number of nodes to enable a large scale deployment of the network. In this paper, we propose a new scalable key management scheme for WSNs which provides a good secure connectivity coverage. For this purpose, we make use of the unital design theory. We show that the basic mapping from unitals to key pre-distribution allows us to achieve high network scalability. Nonetheless, this naive mapping does not guarantee a high key sharing probability. Therefore, we propose an enhanced unital-based key pre-distribution scheme providing high network scalability and good key sharing probability approximately lower bounded by 1-e-1 ≈ 0.632. We conduct approximate analysis and simulations and compare our solution to those of existing methods for different criteria such as storage overhead, network scalability, network connectivity, average secure path length and network resiliency. Our results show that the proposed approach enhances the network scalability while providing high secure connectivity coverage and overall improved performance. Moreover, for an equal network size, our solution reduces significantly the storage overhead compared to those of existing solutions.

[1]  Claude Castelluccia,et al.  RoK: A robust key pre-distribution protocol for multi-phase wireless sensor networks , 2007, 2007 Third International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communications Networks and the Workshops - SecureComm 2007.

[2]  Yuguang Fang,et al.  Securing wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2008, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[3]  Bülent Yener,et al.  Key distribution mechanisms for wireless sensor networks : a survey , 2005 .

[4]  Yong Guan,et al.  A robust group-based key management scheme for wireless sensor networks , 2005, IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2005.

[5]  Sushmita Ruj,et al.  Key predistribution using combinatorial designs for grid-group deployment scheme in wireless sensor networks , 2009, TOSN.

[6]  Leandros Tassiulas,et al.  Optimal deployment of large wireless sensor networks , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[7]  Hrishikesh B. Acharya,et al.  The best keying protocol for sensor networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks.

[8]  Yunghsiang Sam Han,et al.  A key management scheme for wireless sensor networks using deployment knowledge , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[9]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  Underground Structure Monitoring with Wireless Sensor Networks , 2007, 2007 6th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.

[10]  Dario Pompili,et al.  Deployment analysis in underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks , 2006, Underwater Networks.

[11]  Dario Pompili,et al.  Challenges for efficient communication in underwater acoustic sensor networks , 2004, SIGBED.

[12]  Mun Choon Chan,et al.  A Dual-Radio Framework for MAC Protocol Implementation in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[13]  Yacine Challal,et al.  A New Scalable Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for WSN , 2012, 2012 21st International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN).

[14]  Rolf Blom,et al.  An Optimal Class of Symmetric Key Generation Systems , 1985, EUROCRYPT.

[15]  Vladimir D. Tonchev,et al.  Unitals and codes , 2003, Discret. Math..

[16]  尚弘 島影 National Institute of Standards and Technologyにおける超伝導研究及び生活 , 2001 .

[17]  Bülent Yener,et al.  Combinatorial Design of Key Distribution Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2004, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[18]  Ivan Stojmenovic,et al.  Fully secure pairwise and triple key distribution in wireless sensor networks using combinatorial designs , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[19]  R. Srikant,et al.  Unreliable sensor grids: coverage, connectivity and diameter , 2003, IEEE INFOCOM 2003. Twenty-second Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37428).

[20]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless underground sensor networks: Research challenges , 2006, Ad Hoc Networks.

[21]  Sasikanth Avancha,et al.  Security for Sensor Networks , 2004 .

[22]  Vijay Varadharajan,et al.  Wireless sensor network key management survey and taxonomy , 2010, J. Netw. Comput. Appl..

[23]  Virgil D. Gligor,et al.  A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks , 2002, CCS '02.

[24]  Mani B. Srivastava,et al.  An environmental energy harvesting framework for sensor networks , 2003, ISLPED '03.

[25]  Dawn Xiaodong Song,et al.  Random key predistribution schemes for sensor networks , 2003, 2003 Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2003..

[26]  Donggang Liu,et al.  Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks , 2005, TSEC.