An Efficient Key Pre-distribution Scheme for Secure Distributed Sensor Networks

Wide-spread deployment of sensor networks is emerging and it presents an economical solution to numerous problems. A number of applications are dependent on secure operation of the sensor network, however, and serious consequences are incurred if the network is compromised or disrupted. In the existing key pre-distribution scheme suitable for low power and resource sensor nodes, shared key is not guaranteed to be found and mutual authentication is not allowed. This paper thus proposes a new key pre-distribution scheme guaranteeing that any pair of nodes can find a common secret key between themselves by using the keys assigned by LU decomposition of a symmetric matrix of a pool of keys. Furthermore, it allows node-to-node mutual authentication. Analysis shows that the existing scheme requires a large number of keys in each sensor node to display a comparable performance as the proposed scheme. Therefore, the superiority of the proposed scheme is more substantial when the memory size of the sensor node is small.