An Innovative Key Establishment Protocol to Reduce Performance Cost in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The key pre-distribution scheme of recent studies related to wireless sensor networks uses the q-composite random key pre-distribution scheme for statistical key distribution to increase the probability of the absence of a shared key among nodes. However, the scheme is not appropriate for the wireless sensor network because of the time and energy that is required to find the shared key. In order to perform secure authentication among nodes in wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes a key establishment protocol, which fully exploits capabilities between cluster head and sensors and puts the cryptographic burden in wherever the resources are less constrained. Because it is not possible to acquire input hash value from output hash value, the proposed protocol will not allow access to the uncompromised key information of sensor nodes from compromised sensor after the establishment of the pairwise key. The proposed protocol uses a minimum number of keys regardless of base stations to expand network operation and is suitable for data convergence and collective processing, requiring less energy consumption than existing protocols. Also, the proposed protocol's authentication uses the two identities based on public-key certificates to prevent the typical key management problem in pure symmetric-key based protocols and to maintain good scalability. Without increasing memory storages, proposed protocol is superior in relation to the average number of neighboring nodes with S vs. DS(S), number of message exchanged per node, and overhead of resource number used in node.