Message-In-a-Bottle: User-Friendly and Secure Key Deployment for Sensor Nodes

Existing protocols for secure key establishment all rely on an unspecified mechanism for initially deploying secrets to sensor nodes. However, no commercially viable and secure mechanism exists for initial setup. Without a guarantee of secure key deployment, the traffic over a sensor network cannot be presumed secure. To address this problem, we present a user-friendly protocol for the secure deployment of cryptographic keys in sensor networks. We propose a collection of five techniques to prevent an attacker from eavesdropping on key deployment. To demonstrate feasibility for real-world use, we implement our protocol on Telos motes and conduct a user study.