Private key agreement and secure communication for heterogeneous sensor networks

Key management is an important building block for all security operations in sensor networks. Most existing key management schemes try to establish shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors; hence, a large number of keys need to be preloaded on each sensor, which necessitates a large key space for the nodes in the network. The recent trend in research is to mainly consider homogeneous sensor networks, and to a lesser degree heterogeneous sensor networks, for key management. In this paper, we propose a novel key agreement protocol which is based on pairing-based cryptography over an elliptic curve. Using this protocol, any two nodes that need to communicate can independently compute the same secret key by using pairing and identity-based encryption properties. The proposed protocol significantly reduces the key space of a node. Additionally, the security analysis of the proposed protocol shows that it is robust against a number of attacks including wormhole attack, masquerade attacks, reply attacks, and message manipulation attacks.