MASY: MAnagement of Secret keYs for federated mobile wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are becoming federated and mobile environments. These new capabilities pose a lot of new possibilities and challenges. One of these challenges is to create a secure environment to allow multiple trusted companies to share and merge their sensor network infrastructure. The most basic need for a secure environment is the deployment of key material. However, most current day research assumes pre-shared secrets between the sensor nodes of most, if not all, companies in a federation. These solutions are often not scalable nor mobile enough to meet realistic business requirements. Additionally, most key deployment protocols totally omit any connectivity with back-end infrastructure. This paper proposes a novel deployment protocol for the MAnagement of Secret keYs (MASY). MASY allows secure deployment of a key to a sensor node when it enters a previously unknown network. By off-loading the trust creation process to the resource-rich back-end infrastructure, the burden on the sensor nodes remains very limited.