Title: Key establishment for layered group-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors: Xueping Li, Dengfeng Yang, Rapinder Sawhney

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, University of Tennessee, 408 East Stadium Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-0700, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, University of Tennessee, 408 East Stadium Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-0700, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, University of Tennessee, 408 East Stadium Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996-0700, USA

Abstract: Establishing pairwise keys for sensors is crucial to secure communications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Several key pre-distribution schemes have been proposed to establish pairwise keys, but they are not scalable and suffer from a dramatic degradation of security when the number of compromised sensor exceeds a threshold. In this paper, we propose a Layered Group-based Key Establishment (LGKE) scheme, in which a logic top layer ensures the scalability through an Exclusion Basic System (EBS) technique while a logic low layer adopts a group-based key preload scheme to ensure the security. The security analysis and quantitative evaluation show the superiority of LGKE with regard to scalability, resilience, robustness and communication overhead.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; network security; key establishment; scalability; group-based deployment; wireless networks; pairwise keys; secure communications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2010.032228

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2010 Vol.5 No.3, pp.150 - 162

Published online: 17 Mar 2010 *

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