CAB: A Cellular Automata-Based Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

We develop a cellular automata (CA) based key management scheme for wireless sensor networks termed CAB. Our proposed scheme allows sensors to establish pairwise keys during any stage of the network operation using pre-loaded CAs. Additionally, CAB has the following nice properties: i) it is computationally efficient because operation can be as simple as bitwise OR and XOR; ii) it achieves quasi-perfect resilience against node compromise because the computed pairwise keys are unique with high probability; iii) it is the first scheme that inherently provides rekeying capabilities.