Light weight key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a light weight key establishment technique for wireless sensor networks. The proposed method is a hybrid of two popular key exchange protocols LEAP (Localised encryption and authentication protocol) and COKE (Crypto-less over the air key establishment) and addresses the weakness of both schemes. The security analysis shows that the system is secure against active adversaries and node compromise. Compared to COKE, the proposed scheme guarantees a secret key establishment and is energy efficient with a single MAC computation for secret key establishment.