A key management scheme in distributed sensor networks using attack probabilities

Clustering approaches have been found useful in providing scalable data aggregation, security and coding for large scale distributed sensor networks (DSNs). Clustering (also known as subgrouping) has also been effective in containing and compartmentalizing node compromise in large scale networks. We consider the problem of designing a clustered DSN when the probability of node compromise in different deployment regions is known a priori. We make use of the a priori probability to design a variant of random key predistribution method that improves the resilience and hence the fraction of compromised communications compared to seminal works. We further relate the key ring size of the subgroup node to the probability of node compromise, and design an effective scalable security mechanism that increases the resilience to the attacks for the sensor subgroups. Simulation results show that by using our scheme, the performance can be substantially improved in the sensor network (including the resilience and the fraction of compromised communications) that only sacrifices a small extent in the probability of a shared key exists between two nodes, compared to those of the prior results.