An efficient end to end key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks are suitable candidates for military and scientific applications such as border security and environmental monitoring. They are usually deployed in unattended or hostile environments so security is a major concern with these networks. A fundamental requirement is the capability to establish pairwise keys between sensors. Many key establishment protocols have been proposed to address the security issues in wireless sensor networks. However, most of these have security or performance limitations. In this paper, we propose a new key establishment protocol based on symmetric polynomials. In our protocol, contrary to other works, we use a lot of symmetric polynomials to generate polynomial shares for a group of sensors, and the distribution of polynomial shares to each sensor is done by combinatorial design. Since, a limited number of shares are generated from a symmetric polynomial; the polynomial degree is very low. As a result, the common key between sensors can be generated without imposing overhead to them.