Lightweight key establishment with the assistance of mutually connected sensors in wireless sensor networks (WSNs)

Abstract

Abstract Sensitive data collected by a wireless sensor network (WSN) should be protected by a secret key shared between two adjacent (or neighboring) sensors. Sensors are mobile devices with limited memory and computational power, and sensors are deployed in a field randomly in which relative positions among sensors cannot be pre‐determined. Key distribution in WSN is a challenging research problem. Random key distribution is one of the most popular key distribution techniques in WSN; but it is a probabilistic key distribution scheme since two neighboring sensors may or may not share any pairwise key. There are many published papers to improve the probability of connectivity of two neighboring sensors. In this paper, a novel design of lightweight key establishment is proposed based on top of random key distribution. The first scheme can increase the probability of connectivity of two neighboring sensors, and the second scheme can also enable sensors to authenticate the established pairwise key. Both schemes need only XOR operation so they are lightweight and especially suitable for WSNs.