A key predistribution scheme with matrix decomposition for secure wireless sensor networks

As a fundamental requirement for providing security functionality in wireless sensor networks, key predistribution plays a central role in authentication and encryption. In the existing key predistribution scheme suitable for low power and resource sensor nodes, mutual authentication is not allowed and the security tolerance of network is low. In this paper, we propose a new key predistribution scheme guaranteeing that any two sensor nodes can find a shared key between themselves. The basic idea of the paper is to combine matrix decomposition technique and polynomial-based key predistribution approach. The analysis in this paper indicates that the existing schemes require a large number of keys in each sensor node to display a comparable connectivity as the proposed scheme which allows almost 100% connectivity regardless of the number of keys, and it enhances security by node-to-node mutual authentication. On the other hand, introducing polynomial-based key predistribtion, our scheme greatly improves the resilience against node capture.