Secured node-to-node key agreement for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks are mostly deployed in unsecured environments, thus protecting a sensor network from any attack is critical in order to maintain the health of the network. Recently, many researchers have focused on making security for sensor networks available and reliable. In this paper, a secured node-to-node key agreement protocol is proposed to generate secured communication among principle nodes A and B, a ticket granting server, and a key server. Since a sensor network is usually a resource-constrained infrastructure, it is not suitable for computationally expensive asymmetric key protocols such as public-private key cryptography. Therefore, setting up a shared key in our proposed protocol is based on a symmetric key protocol processed by two trusted agents, which are the ticket granting server and the key server. The data confidentiality, authentication, and freshness of the network security are also considered in the design of the proposed protocol.