Scalable Grouping Random Key Predistribution in Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Po-Jen  Chuang; Tun-Hao  Chao; Bo-Yi Li

doi:10.6180/jase.2009.12.2.07

Scalable Grouping Random Key Predistribution in Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Po-Jen Chuang This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.¹, Tun-Hao Chao¹ and Bo-Yi Li¹

¹Department of Electrical Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taiwan 251, R.O.C.

Received: May 21, 2007
Accepted: September 24, 2008
Publication Date: June 1, 2009

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.2009.12.2.07

ABSTRACT

The security issue in a wireless sensor network (WSN) has been drawing considerable research attention in recent years. Key management, a basic security service, becomes the core design for various security services, such as encryption and authentication. To increase the connectivity of each key in a large-scale WSN and to enlarge its maximum supportable network size, this paper presents a scalable grouping (SG) random key predistribution scheme. The SG scheme divides all nodes into several groups and uses the one-way function to generate group-to-group pairwise keys. To improve resilience against node capture, i.e., to fortify the security strength, the scheme takes on the concept that the link key is composed of some shared keys. For any two nodes with two or more shared keys, the SG scheme uses the exclusive-OR operation to compose the link key -- assuring the link key used to secure a link is nearly unique. Experimental results show that the SG scheme is able to generate better resilience against node capture and higher scalability than existing random key based schemes.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Key Management, Random Key Predistribution, Performance Evaluation

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