Stealthy pre-attacks against random key pre-distribution security

Random key pre-distribution (RKPD) has been investigated for large wireless sensor networks, in order to achieve efficient security and robustness against limited node compromise. While it is possible that an adversary obtains a subset of the symmetric keys in use, it has been unclear how to use those to compromise specific secure links. We investigate how the adversary could do this practically. We term this the Stealthy Pre-Attack (SPA), because the adversarial nodes leverage benign behavior to guide their attack. The contribution of this paper is the identification of this adversarial behavior, the evaluation of its benefits for the attacker, which can then much more effectively compromise security, and the proposal of counter-measures to mitigate it.