An Unconditionally Secure Key Management Scheme for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unconditionally secure, probabilistic key management scheme for large-scale heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, ensuring perfect secrecy despite node compromises and supporting dynamic network changes.

Contribution

It presents a novel unconditionally secure key pre-distribution scheme that outperforms existing methods in security, efficiency, and adaptability for sensor networks.

Findings

Guarantees 100% secrecy for non-compromised nodes

Reduces communication and computational overhead

Supports dynamic node addition

Abstract

Key establishment in sensor networks becomes a challenging problem because of the resource limitations of the sensors and also due to vulnerability to physical capture of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose an unconditionally secure probabilistic group-based key pre-distribution scheme for a heterogeneous wireless sensor network. The proposed scheme always guarantees that no matter how many sensor nodes are compromised, the non-compromised nodes can still communicate with 100% secrecy, i.e., the proposed scheme is always unconditionally secure against node capture attacks. Moreover, it provides significantly better trade-off between communication overhead, computational overhead, network connectivity and security against node capture as compared to the existing key pre-distribution schemes. It also supports dynamic node addition after the initial deployment of the nodes in the network.