Establishing secure links in low-rate wireless personal area networks

This paper presents a provably secure and efficient key agreement protocol (SNKE) using private key authentication. The distinguishing features of protocol SNKE are: (a) ease of implementation in the 802.15.4 stack (it makes use of the cryptographic services provided by the media access layer); (b) availability of two operation modes (hash-chain and key-renewal modes) with forward secrecy achieved (in key-renewal mode) with a modest computational effort. In addition, the key distribution scheme, which may be either based on group keys or pairwise keys, combined with both operation modes offers effective levels of protection against long-term key compromise. The protocol was designed to meet the strict power and energy constraints of lowrate wireless personal area networks (802.15.4 WPANs). Indeed, the foreseeable applications include the deployment of standard-compliant secure wireless sensor networks (WSNs).