A Hybrid Key Management Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are wireless ad-hoc networks of tiny battery-operated wireless sensors. They are usually deployed in unsecured, open, and, harsh environments where it is difficult for humans to perform continuous monitoring. Due to its nature of deployment it is very crucial to provide security mechanisms for authenticating data. Key management is a pre-requisite for any security mechanism. Due to memory, computation, and communication constraints of sensor nodes, distribution and management of key in WSNs is a challenging task. Because of its lightweight feature, symmetric crypto-systems are a natural choice for key management in WSNs. However, they often fail to provide a good trade-off between resilience and storage. On the other hand, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is infeasible in WSNs because of its continuous availability of trusted third party and heavy computational requirements for certificate verification. Pairing-Based Cryptography (PBC) has paved a way for how parties can agree on keys without any interaction. It has relaxed the requirement of expensive certificate verification on PKI system. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid ID based non-interactive key management protocol for WSNs, which leverages the benefits from both symmetric key based cryptosystems and PBC by combining them together. The proposed protocol is very flexible and suits many applications. We also provide mechanisms for key refresh when the network changes.

[1]  Ricardo Dahab,et al.  Identity-Based Encryption for Sensor Networks , 2007, Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PerComW'07).

[2]  Mohamed Abid,et al.  An Efficient Scheme for Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications.

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

[4]  Boleslaw K. Szymanski,et al.  Local leader election, signal strength aware flooding, and routeless routing , 2005, 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.

[5]  Yusnani Mohd Yussoff,et al.  IBE-Trust: A security framework for Wireless Sensor Networks , 2011, 2011 World Congress on Internet Security (WorldCIS-2011).

[6]  Donggang Liu,et al.  Location-based pairwise key establishments for static sensor networks , 2003, SASN '03.

[7]  Flaviu Cristian,et al.  A Highly Available Local Leader Election Service , 1999, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

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

[9]  Rung Ching Chen,et al.  Efficient Key Pre-distribution for Sensor Nodes with Strong Connectivity and Low Storage Space , 2008, 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (aina 2008).

[10]  Yunghsiang Sam Han,et al.  A pairwise key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks , 2003, CCS '03.

[11]  Peng Ning,et al.  An efficient scheme for authenticating public keys in sensor networks , 2005, MobiHoc '05.

[12]  Shouhuai Xu,et al.  Establishing pairwise keys for secure communication in ad hoc networks: a probabilistic approach , 2003, 11th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, 2003. Proceedings..

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

[14]  Matthew K. Franklin,et al.  Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing , 2001, CRYPTO.

[15]  Chunming Rong,et al.  Identity-based key agreement and encryption for wireless sensor networks , 2006 .

[16]  Antoine Joux,et al.  A One Round Protocol for Tripartite Diffie–Hellman , 2000, Journal of Cryptology.

[17]  J. Spencer.  The Strange Logic of Random Graphs , 2001 .

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

[19]  Srinivas Sampalli,et al.  A robust pair-wise and group key management protocol for wireless sensor network , 2010, 2010 IEEE Globecom Workshops.

[20]  Young-Koo Lee,et al.  HGKM: A Group-Based Key Management Scheme for Sensor Networks Using Deployment Knowledge , 2008, 6th Annual Communication Networks and Services Research Conference (cnsr 2008).

[21]  Paulo S. L. M. Barreto,et al.  A survey on key management mechanisms for distributed Wireless Sensor Networks , 2010, Comput. Networks.

[22]  Mário Serafim Nunes,et al.  Probabilistic Key Management Practical Concerns in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, J. Networks.

[23]  Adrian Perrig,et al.  PIKE: peer intermediaries for key establishment in sensor networks , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[24]  Chuan-Ming Liu,et al.  Enhancing the Key Pre-distribution Scheme on Wireless Sensor Networks , 2008, 2008 IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference.

[25]  G. Padmavathi,et al.  A Survey of Attacks, Security Mechanisms and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, ArXiv.

[26]  Hovav Shacham,et al.  Short Signatures from the Weil Pairing , 2001, J. Cryptol..

[27]  Ricardo Dahab,et al.  TinyPBC: Pairings for authenticated identity-based non-interactive key distribution in sensor networks , 2008, 2008 5th International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems.

[28]  Robert H. Deng,et al.  Practical ID-based encryption for wireless sensor network , 2010, ASIACCS '10.

[29]  Adi Shamir,et al.  Identity-Based Cryptosystems and Signature Schemes , 1984, CRYPTO.

[30]  Moti Yung,et al.  Perfectly Secure Key Distribution for Dynamic Conferences , 1998, Inf. Comput..