Practical Pairwise Key Establishment Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks via Constrained Random Perturbation

The resource limitation of sensor nodes poses a great challenge in designing an efficient key establishment scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In spite of the fact that many elegant and clever solutions have been proposed, no practical key establishment scheme has emerged. In this paper, a ConstrAined Random Perturbation based pairwise keY establishment (CARPY) scheme and its variant, a CARPY+ scheme, forWSNs, are presented. Compared to all existing schemes which satisfy only some requirements in so-called sensor-key criteria, including 1) resilience to various attacks, 2) directed and guaranteed key establishment, 3) resilience to network configurations, 4) efficiency, and 5) resilience to dynamic node deployment, the proposed CARPY+ scheme meets all requirements. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, CARPY+ is the first non-interactive key establishment scheme with great resilience to a large number of node compromises designed for WSNs. We examine the CARPY and CARPY+ schemes from both the theoretical and experimental aspects. They have also been practically implemented on the TelosB compatible mote to evaluate the corresponding performance and overhead.