PIKE: peer intermediaries for key establishment in sensor networks

The establishment of shared cryptographic keys between communicating neighbor nodes in sensor networks is a challenging problem due to the unsuitability of asymmetric key cryptography for these resource-constrained platforms. A range of symmetric-key distribution protocols exist, but these protocols do not scale effectively to large sensor networks. For a given level of security, each protocol incurs a linearly increasing overhead in either communication cost per node or memory per node. We describe peer intermediaries for key establishment (PIKE), a class of key-establishment protocols that involves using one or more sensor nodes as a trusted intermediary to facilitate key establishment. We show that, unlike existing key-establishment protocols, both the communication and memory overheads of PIKE protocols scale sub-linearly (O(√n)) with the number of nodes in the network yet achieving higher security against node compromise than other protocols.