Key splitting for random key distribution schemes

A large number of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) security schemes have been proposed in the literature, relying primarily on symmetric key cryptography. To enable those, Random Key pre-Distribution (RKD) systems have been widely accepted. However, WSN nodes are vulnerable to physical compromise. Capturing one or more nodes operating with RKD would give the adversary keys to compromise communication of other benign nodes. Thus the challenge is to enhance resilience of WSN to node capture, while maintaining the flexibility and low-cost features of RKD. We address this problem, without any special-purpose hardware, proposing a new and simple idea: key splitting. Our scheme does not increase per-node storage, and computation and communication overheads, and it can increase connectivity. More important, it achieves a significant increase in resilience to compromise compared to the state of the art, notably when the adversary does not have overwhelming computational power.