HaG: Hash graph based key predistribution scheme for multiphase wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of small sensor nodes which operate until their energy reserve is depleted. These nodes are generally deployed to the environments where network lifespan is much longer than the lifetime of a node. Therefore, WSN are typically operated in a multiphase fashion, as in [1-3, 9-10], which use different key pools for nodes deployed at different generations. In multiphase WSN, new nodes are periodically deployed to the environment to ensure constant local and global network connectivity. Also, key ring of these newly deployed nodes is selected from their deployment generation key pool to improve the resiliency of WSN. In this paper, we propose a key predistribution scheme for multiphase WSN which is resilient against permanent and temporary node capture attacks. In our Hash Graph based (HaG) scheme, every generation has its own key pool which is generated using the key pool of the previous generation. This allows nodes deployed at different generations to have the ability to establish secure channels. Likewise, a captured node can only be used to obtain keys for a limited amount of successive generations. We compare the connectivity and resiliency performance of our scheme with other multiphase key predistribution schemes and show that our scheme performs better when the attack rate is low. When the attack rate is high, our scheme still has better resiliency performance inasmuch as using less key ring size compared to the existing multiphase schemes.