A probabilistic key agreement scheme for sensor networks without key predistribution

摘要

The dynamic establishment of shared information (e.g. secret key) between twoentities is particularly important in networks with no pre-determined structuresuch as wireless sensor networks (and in general wireless mobile ad-hocnetworks). In such networks, nodes establish and terminate communicationsessions dynamically with other nodes which may have never been encounteredbefore, in order to somehow exchange information which will enable them tosubsequently communicate in a secure manner. In this paper we give andtheoretically analyze a series of protocols that enables two entities that havenever encountered each other before to establish a shared piece of informationfor use as a key in setting up a secure communication session with the aid of ashared key encryption algorithm. These protocols do not require previouspre-distribution of candidate keys or some other piece of information ofspecialized form except a small seed value, from which the two entities canproduce arbitrarily long strings with many similarities.