Improved Pairwise Key Establishment for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the resource constraints, pre-distributing secret keys into sensor nodes before they are deployed is an applicable approach to achieve information security in wireless sensor networks. Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed in literature to establish pairwise keys between sensor nodes; they are either too complicated, or insecure for some common attacks. To address these weaknesses, we propose an improved pairwise key establishment mechanism for wireless sensor networks in this paper. Compared with existing approaches, our scheme has better network resilience against node capture attack. Analysis and simulation results show that our scheme performs better than earlier proposed schemes in terms of network connectivity, key storage overhead, maximum supported network size, computational and communication overheads