Applicability Drawbacks of Probabilistic Key Management Schemes for Real World Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks

The subject of Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks has gained increased attention from the security community around the world in the last years. Several proposals were made concerning the peculiarities of resource constrains inherent to sensor devices. One of the most accepted of proposals is based on random distribution of keys among the sensor nodes, which was followed by some variants in order to increase its security. In this paper we present some drawbacks of this class of proposals based on probabilistic key management, concerning its applicability to present real world applications where the technological constrains strictly compromise the mathematical theoretical models.