An Efficient Pairwise Key Establishment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed large number of low power sensor nodes. Security in WSNs is critical when there are potential adversaries. Establishment of pairwise keys is a fundamental security service, which form the basis of other security services such as authentication and encryptions. However, due to the resource constraints, establishing pairwise keys in WSNs is not a trivial task. Several exiting key management schemes have been proposed in literature to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes, but they either can not offer strong resilience against node capture attacks or have overly large memory requirement to achieve high degree of connectivity. In this paper, we prose an efficient pairwise key management scheme, in which there are two key pools in the proposed scheme and the keys in one key pool are the hash value of keys in another key pool. The analysis indicates that compared with existing approaches, this proposed scheme offers a stronger resilience against node capture attack.