A Deterministic Multiple Key Space Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks via Combinatorial Designs

The establishing of a pairwise key between two nodes for encryption in a wireless sensor network is a challenging issue. To do this, we propose a new deterministic key pre-distribution scheme which has modified the multiple key space scheme (MKSS). In the MKSS, the authors define two random parameters to make better resilience than existing schemes. Instead of a random selection of these parameters, our proposal provides a combinatorial framework by substituting appropriate parameters to satisfy certain properties. We show that the proposed scheme enhances storage memory and improves performance or security by carefully choosing a combinatorial design. In addition, we propose a new key agreement mechanism by using derivative operation on univariate polynomials to aim a desired computational overhead. In this case, the computational overhead of our approach lower than the general case of the MKSS’s. If we choose the primitive element in our general formula as the special case of the MKSS, this new process has the same computational overhead as the MKSS.