A New Efficient Pairwise Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks, pairwise key establishment is a fundamental security service. However, establishing pairwise keys in wireless sensor networks is not a trivial thing, particularly due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, and the nodes capture attack. In this paper, we propose a new efficient pairwise key management scheme based on the work of Liu et al. (Liu et. al., 2006). In our scheme, after deployment, a few sensor nodes are self-elected to become service nodes, which are responsible for key generation and distribution. The majority of the nodes are worker nodes, which are responsible for sensing and reporting data, and the keys shared by the nodes are distributed by service nodes. Compared with the scheme(LKE) provided by Liu et. al., our scheme does not need to learn the accurate locations of nodes. In addition, our scheme needs no computational overhead and requires less memory; the resilience against nodes capture attack is perfect. Simulation analysis is also provided.