NIS06-2: I-HARPS: An Efficient Key Predistribution Scheme for Mobile Computing Applications

With rapidly decreasing cost of storage, even for mobile computing applications involving PDAs / mobile phones storage (using flash memory) is an inexpensive resource. We introduce a novel probabilistic key predistribution scheme (PKPS) I-HARPS which can make good use of this inexpensive resource to improve security. I-HARPS is a combination of random subset allocation schemes first proposed by Dyer et al [1] in 1995, and the escrowed master key based key distribution scheme proposed by Leighton and Micali in 1993 [2]. While PKPSs have received substantial attention recently in the context of highly resource constrained sensor networks, we argue that the fact that I-HARPS can resist coalitions of even millions of nodes with very low computational complexity, and very reasonable storage requirements, can significantly expand the scope of applications of PKPSs.