Server Assisted Key Establishment for WSN: A MIKEY-Ticket Approach

MIKEY-Ticket specifies new modes for the Multimedia Internet KEYing (MIKEY) protocol. It answers situations where the network contains a trusted third party (one or many trusted key management servers). Two of MIKEY-Ticket modes correspond to Kerberos and Otway--Rees key distribution protocols. Meanwhile, the general MIKEY--Ticket mode is a new key distribution scheme relying on six messages which are exchanged between the node initiating the protocol (Initiator), the Key Management Server (KMS) and the responding node (Responder). This general mode suffers from a risk of a Denial of Service (DoS) inherited from the protocol design. In this work, we first propose a new MIKEY--Ticket mode that solves the risk of DoS during the key establishment between the Initiator and the Responder. The security of our solution is evaluated with ProVerif, a protocol verification tool. Then, in the second part of the paper, we describe the application of our protocol to sensors in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN).