Secure Pairwise Key Establishment for Key Predistribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Key establishment has been a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks. With the increasing of the sensor network applications, many key predistribution schemes are proposed. In most key predistribution schemes, sensors are loaded with preassigned keys. Sensor nodes discover common keys to establish secure connection with neighboring nodes. Nodes that are not directly connected use intermediate nodes which form a path to establish common keys. However, these schemes are vulnerable to stop forwarding attacks and intermediate nodes along the path may reveal the key. This paper presents a secret sharing based multi-path key establishment mechanism to counter these attacks. The proposed mechanism can be combined with other predistribution schemes. The analysis to our scheme indicates that it achieves better security performance.