Title: An one-way function based framework for pairwise key establishment in sensor networks

Authors: Liran Ma, Amin Y. Teymorian, Kai Xing, Ding-Zhu Du

Addresses: School of Technology, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083, USA

Abstract: We develop a one-way function based key establishment framework for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The proposed framework allows sensors to establish pairwise session keys at an arbitrary network operation stage using pre-loaded one-way functions. We also present an efficient instantiation of the proposed framework using Cellular Automata (CA). The analysis based on the CA instantiation indicates that our framework possesses a number of nice properties: inherent support for rekeying; quasi-perfect resilience against node compromise; computational efficiency; strong cryptographic strength of generated pairwise keys; a high probability to establish pairwise keys between sensors.

Keywords: security; key management; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; WSN; one-way functions; cellular automata; wireless networks; pairwise keys; rekeying; node compromise; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2008.020729

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2008 Vol.3 No.4, pp.217 - 225

Published online: 12 Oct 2008 *

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