Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of low-cost, low-power, and multi-functional sensor nodes that communicate at short distances through wireless links. Those networks could be deployed in an open and hostile environment where attackers may be present. In this context, it is necessary to guarantee confidentiality, integrity and security services in the network. Those security properties could only be achieved if security associations have been created in the network between pairs of nodes, each node and the base station of groups of nodes. Those associations are created through key management protocols for pairwise or group establishment, distribution, renewing of cryptographic keys. Those protocols must only use information that is available in the network or pre-loaded in each sensor as the WSNs mus be autonomous.
Moreover, due to the low-cost nature of each node, an attacker is able to compromise nodes because the nodes are not tamper-resistant. Thus a major challenge of the key management protocols becomes to preserve the general security of the network even if t nodes are compromised. We propose in this article a key management and access control protocol based upon a group deployment model. Moreover, this protocol is t-secure, i.e. t corrupted nodes are not sufficient to corrupt all the keys used in the network.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Bekara, C., & Laurent-Maknavicius, M. (2007). A new resilient key management protocol for wireless sensor networks. In WISTP (pp. 14–26).
Blom, R. (1984). An optimal class of symmetric key generation systems. In EUROCRYPT (pp. 335–338).
Blundo, C., De Santis, A., Vaccaro, U., Herzberg, A., Kutten, S., & Yong, M. (1998). Perfectly secure key distribution for dynamic conferences. Information and Computation, 146(1), 1–23.
Camtepe, S. A., & Yener, B. (2005). Key distribution mechanisms for wireless sensor networks: a survey. Technical report, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY.
Castelluccia, C., & Spognardi, A. (2007). RoK: a robust key pre-distribution protocol for multi-stage wireless sensor networks. In SecureComm’07: 3rd International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks.
Chan, H. (2005). Pike: Peer intermediaries for key establishment in sensor networks. In Proceedings of IEEE Infocom (pp. 524–535).
Chan, H., Perrig, A., & Song, D. (2003). Random key predistribution schemes for sensor networks. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (pp. 197–213).
Cheng, Y., & Agrawal, D. P. (2005). Efficient pairwise key establishment and management in static wireless sensor networks. In The Second IEEE International Conference on Mobile ad hoc and Sensor Systems.
Diffie, W., & Hellman, M. (1976). New directions in cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 22(6), 644–654.
Du, W., Deng, J., Han, Y. S., Chen, S., & Varshney, P. K. (2004). A key management scheme for wireless sensor networks using deployment knowledge. In INFOCOM 2004: Twenty-Third Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (p. 597). Los Alamitos: IEEE Comput. Soc.
Dutertre, B., Cheung, S., & Levy, J. (2004). Lightweight key management in wireless sensor networks by leveraging initial trust, sdl. Technical report, SRI-SDL-04-02.
Eschenauer, L., & Gligor, V. D. (2002). A key-management scheme for distributed sensor networks. In CCS ’02: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, New York, NY, USA (pp. 41–47). New York: ACM.
Lai, B., Kim, S., & Verbauwhede, I. (2002). Scalable session key construction protocol for wireless sensor networks. In IEEE Workshop on Large Scale Real Time and Embedded Systems (LARTES) (p. 7).
Lamport, L. (1981). Password authentication with insecure communication. Communications of the ACM, 24(11), 770–772.
Liu, D., & Ning, P. (2003). Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks. In CCS ’03: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, New York, NY, USA (pp. 52–61). New York: ACM.
Liu, D., & Ning, P. (2003). Location-based pairwise key establishments for static sensor networks. In SASN ’03: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Security of ad hoc and Sensor Networks, New York, NY, USA (pp. 72–82). New York: ACM.
Liu, D., Ning, P., & Du, W. (2008). Group-based key predistribution for wireless sensor networks. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 4(2), 1–30.
Liu, D., Ning, P., & Li, R. (2005). Establishing pairwise keys in distributed sensor networks. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security , 8(1), 41–77.
Liu, F., Manny-Rivera, J., & Cheng, X. (2006). Location-aware key establishment in wireless sensor networks. In IWCMC ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, New York, NY, USA (pp. 21–26). New York: ACM.
Perrig, A., Szewczyk, R., Tygar, J. D., Wen, V., & Culler, D. E. (2002). Spins: security protocols for sensor networks. Wireless Networks, 8(5), 521–534.
Di Pietro, R., Mancini, L. V., & Mei, A. (2003). Random key-assignment for secure wireless sensor networks. In SASN ’03: Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Security of Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, New York, NY, USA (pp. 62–71). New York: ACM.
Wander, A., Gura, N., Eberle, H., Gupta, V., & Shantz, S. (2005). Energy analysis of public-key cryptography on small wireless devices. In IEEE PerCom.
Xu, D., Huang, J., Dwoskin, J., Chiang, M., & Lee, R. (2007). Re-examining probabilistic versus deterministic key management. In IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, 2007. ISIT 2007 (pp. 2586–2590).
Yu, H., Gibbons, P. B., Kaminsky, M., & Xiao, F. (2008). Sybillimit: A near-optimal social network defense against sybil attacks. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (pp. 3–17). Los Alamitos: IEEE Comput. Soc.
Zhu, S., Setia, S., & Jajodia, S. (2003). Leap: efficient security mechanisms for large-scale distributed sensor networks. In CCS ’03: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, New York, NY, USA (pp. 62–72). New York: ACM.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Znaidi, W., Minier, M. Key establishment and management for WSNs. Telecommun Syst 50, 113–125 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9391-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-010-9391-2