Smart Dust Security – Key Infection Revisited

Sensor network is a notion denoting an interesting subset of self-organising wireless networks. These networks are rather dense as each node have typically more than dozen neighbours, and large – with tens to hundreds thousands of nodes. Applications of such networks assume distributed environmental sensing performed by each sensor in the network, where data from a particular sensor gain value only when combined with data from a relatively high number of other sensors. One of the open security questions in this specific environment is a possibility to lower requirements on key distribution and key management and thus decrease production costs. One of the possible ways is “key infection”. The paper recaps a protocol and already published results. It also elaborates the concept of key infection by introducing a new variant of security amplification protocol, and presents some interesting results obtained by simulations.