Establishing authenticated pairwise key using Pairing-based Cryptography for sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a novel authenticated key agreement scheme using Pairing-based Cryptography, named IBAKA, to address the problems of high memory occupation, low key connectivity and poor resiliency against node capture attacks existed in the traditional key management protocols of large scale sensor networks. Our proposal, which works based on the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) exchange and identity-based cryptography, can effectively resist man-in-the-middle attacks and node-capture attacks through encrypting the exchanged parameters using identity-based encryption. Theoretical analysis indicates that compare with the typical random key pre-distribution approaches; IBAKA achieves significant improvements in terms of security strength, key connectivity, scalability, communication and storage overhead, and enables efficient secure rekeying. Furthermore, we implement IBAKA for TinyOS-2.1 based on the MICA2 motes. The experiment results demonstrate that IBAKA is feasible for infrequent key distribution and rekeying in large scale sensor networks.