A Pair Wise Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are highly vulnerable to attacks for the limitation of constrained resource and communicating via wireless links, especially running in a hostile environment such as battlefields. In such situation, an adversary may capture any node compromising critical security data including keys used for confidentiality and authentication. Consequently, it is necessary to provide security services to these networks to ensure their survival. In this paper, we propose a new key management technique based on differentiated key pre-distribution, to provide end-to-end secure communication. The core idea is to distribute different number of keys to different sensors to enhance the resilience of certain links. This feature is leveraged during routing, where nodes route through those links with higher resilience. The analysis also shows that the technique can substantially improve the security as well as the performance of existing key pre-distribution techniques.