Identity-Based Key Distribution for Wireless Sensor Networks using Cryptographic Techniques

Wireless sensor networks are being deployed for a wide variety of applications. It is an important challenge to find out practical security protocols for wireless sensor networks due to limitation of power, computation and storage resources. Symmetric key techniques are attractive due to their energy efficiency. But the drawbacks of symmetric key techniques are evident in terms of key management and security. Public key infrastructure is considered to be not suitable to provide security for wireless sensor networks because of complexity. But some studies on elliptic curves cryptography indicate that algorithm based on this kind of cryptography could be a potential choice. Fortunately, a practical identity-based cryptography is proposed recently, which gives a possibility to employ elliptic curves cryptography in wireless sensor networks. Compared with the traditional asymmetric and symmetric key techniques, the distinguishing characteristic of identity-based encryption is the ability to use any string as a public key, for example, an email address, a name, etc. Based on the Boneh-Franklin IBE algorithms, we proposed an identity-based key distribution and encryption scheme for wireless sensor networks. Analysis shows that our scheme has some advantages in terms of key management, storage requirement and security. The large number of new applications for wireless sensor networks has lead to unprecedented growth of wireless sensor networks.