A secure key agreement scheme in low-energy wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing environment provides users with information access anytime and anywhere. In particular, sensor networks must be broadly deployed in real world and utilized to ensure the safety of the human life. In cryptography aspect, key agreement protocol is very important element to exchange messages safely between sensor nodes. This concern originates from the fact that sensor nodes are highly vulnerable to faults, energy depletions, and security attacks. The open problems are how to verify the identity of communicating nodes, how to set up a session key between communicating nodes, and how to minimize any information about the keys disclosed to the other side of key agreement. To solve above problems, we propose a secure key agreement scheme for low-energy sensor networks. Our scheme is based on the MRS scheme and enhances the security by hiding unshared keys and the number of shared keys. Besides, it resolves the weak points in encryption mechanism of MRS by employing multiple random numbers. Performance and security analyses have proven that our scheme is suitable for sensor networks in terms of availability and security aspects. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.