A high performance and intrinsically secure key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks

Key establishment among neighboring sensors is the most challenging issue for security services such as authentication and confidentiality in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many key establishment schemes have recently been proposed, but most have security or performance issues. In this paper, we propose a novel key establishment protocol which is suitable for low resource sensor nodes. In this protocol, each sensor has a secret key and some common keys with other sensors. A common key between two sensors is generated using the secret of one sensor and the identity of the other. This key is stored in one of the sensors, and the other sensor generates it when a secure connection is required. We develop the proposed protocol for different key distribution models. These models use pre-deployment knowledge to distribute the common keys among sensors. The proposed scheme is analyzed based on connectivity, scalability, memory consumption and resistance against attacks. In comparison with previous approaches, the proposed protocol is the most resilient against compromised node attacks. In addition, it has low memory requirements and low computational overhead.