Hierarchical Grid-Based Pairwise Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical grid-based key pre-distribution method for wireless sensor networks, enhancing security and connectivity while considering resource constraints and deployment knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces a novel key pre-distribution technique leveraging hierarchical grid deployment and deployment knowledge to improve security and resource efficiency.

Findings

Enhanced security level proportional to sensor deployment

Improved network connectivity compared to existing methods

Resiliency against node capture attacks

Abstract

The security of wireless sensor networks is an active topic of research where both symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography issues have been studied. Due to their computational feasibility on typical sensor nodes, symmetric key algorithms that use the same key to encrypt and decrypt messages have been intensively studied and perfectly deployed in such environment. Because of the wireless sensor's limited infrastructure, the bottleneck challenge for deploying these algorithms is the key distribution. For the same reason of resources restriction, key distribution mechanisms which are used in traditional wireless networks are not efficient for sensor networks. To overcome the key distribution problem, several key pre-distribution algorithms and techniques that assign keys or keying material for the networks nodes in an offline phase have been introduced recently. In this paper, we introduce a supplemental distribution technique based on the communication pattern and deployment knowledge modeling. Our technique is based on the hierarchical grid deployment. For granting a proportional security level with number of dependent sensors, we use different polynomials in different orders with different weights. In seek of our proposed work's value, we provide a detailed analysis on the used resources, resulting security, resiliency, and connectivity compared with other related works.