Application-specific hybrid symmetric design of key pre-distribution for wireless sensor networks

• Published in: Security and communication networks Vol. 8; no. 8; pp. 1561 - 1574
• Main Authors: Dargahi, Tooska, Javadi, Hamid H. S., Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Blackwell Publishing Ltd 25-05-2015; Hindawi Limited
• Subjects: Balancing; Blocking; hybrid symmetric design; key pre-distribution; Pools; Remote sensors; Resilience; Security; Sensors; symmetric BIBD; Wireless networks; wireless sensor network
• ISSN: 1939-0114; 1939-0122
• DOI: 10.1002/sec.1104

Wireless sensor networks have been established for a wide range of applications in adversarial environments, which makes secure communication between sensor nodes a challenging issue. To achieve high level of security, each pair of nodes must share a secret key in order to communicate with each other. Because of the random deployment of sensors, a set of keys must be pre‐distributed, so that each sensor node is assigned a set of keys from a key pool before the deployment. The keys stored in each node must be carefully selected to increase the probability of key share between two neighboring nodes. In this paper, we consider a hybrid key pre‐distribution scheme based on the balanced incomplete block design. We present a new approach for choosing key pool in the hybrid symmetric design that improves the connectivity and scalability of the network. We also introduce an extension to the proposed approach to detract memory usage and improve resilience. Experimental results verify the performance and applicability of our approach. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
In this paper, we propose a hybrid key pre‐distribution scheme based on balanced incomplete block design for wireless sensor networks. We use two similar key pools with some different keys and apply balanced incomplete block design on each key pool in order to generate key chains to pre‐distribute in sensor nodes deterministically. The proposed approach improves scalability and establishes a trade‐off between key share probability and resilience according to the application requirements. We also introduce an extension to the proposed approach to detract memory usage.