A scalable key pre-distribution mechanism for large-scale wireless sensor networks

Many applications of wireless sensor network (WSN) require secure data communications, especially in a hostile environment. In order to protect the sensitive data and the sensor readings, secret keys should be used to encrypt the exchanged messages between communicating nodes. Traditional asymmetric key cryptosystems are infeasible in WSNs due to the extremely low capacity and constrained resources at each senor node. Recently proposed protocols are either vulnerable to the large-scale node capture attacks or lack of performance scalability in terms of storage, communication and computation costs. To address these limitations, we study the key pre-distribution schemes in this paper and propose a new one with all of the following properties which are particularly beneficial to the large-scale resource-constrained WSNs: (1) it completely defends against the node capture attacks, (2) it provides full connectivity of the network, and (3) it reduces the storage and communication overhead significantly compared with the other proposals. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.