Revisiting public-key cryptography for wireless sensor networks

The lack of a fixed infrastructure and the ad hoc nature of wireless sensor networks deployments suggest that the ability to encrypt and decrypt confidential data among arbitrary sensor nodes while enabling undisputed authentication of all parties will be a fundamental prerequisite for achieving security. To do this, nodes must be able to establish a secret key and know who their counterparts are. Thus, it becomes highly desirable to have a secure and efficient distribution mechanism that allows simple key generation for large-scale sensor networks while facilitating all the necessary authentications.