Using Auxiliary Sensors for Pairwise Key Establishment in WSN

摘要

Many techniques have been developed recently for establishing pairwise keys in sensor networks. However, some of them are vulnerable to a few compromised sensor nodes, while others could involve expensive protocols for establishing keys. This article introduces a much better alternative that can achieve both high resilience to node compromises and high efficiency in key establishment. The main idea is to deploy a small number of additional sensor nodes, called assisting nodes, to help key establishment between sensor nodes. The proposed approach has many advantages over existing approaches. In particular, a sensor node only needs to make a few local communications and perform a few efficient hash operations to setup a key with any other sensor node in the network at a very high probability. The majority of sensor nodes only need to store a single key. Besides, it also provides high resilience to node compromises. The theoretical analysis, simulation studies, and experiments on TelosB sensor motes also demonstrate the advantages of this key establishment protocol in sensor networks.