A key management scheme for large scale distributed sensor networks

Abstract

To guarantee secure communication in wireless sensor networks, secret keys should be securely established between sensor nodes. Recently, an efficient security mechanism was proposed for large-scale distributed sensor networks by Zhu, Setia, and Jajodia. In their scheme, each node uses a single initial key to establish pair-wise keys and erases the key after key setup. If the key is compromised during key setup, however, the entire network will be compromised. Therefore, the performance overhead during key setup is very important for the speedy key establishment. In this paper, we propose a modified scheme which reduces the performance overhead during key setup and has provable security after key setup. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.