To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt and authenticate messages sent between sensor nodes. Before doing so, keys for performing encryption and authentication must be agreed upon by the communicating parties. Due to resource constraints, however, achieving key agreement in wireless sensor networks is nontrivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and other public-key based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks due to the limited computational abilities of the sensor nodes. Predistribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of memory this requires when the network size is large. In this paper, we provide a framework in which to study the security of key predistribution schemes, propose a new key predistribution scheme which substantially improves the resilience of the network compared to previous schemes, and give an in-depth analysis of our scheme in terms of network resilience and associated overhead. Our scheme exhibits a nice threshold property: when This work was supported in part by grants ISS-0219560 and CCR-0310751 from the National Science Foundation, by the SUPRIA program of the CASE Center at Syracuse University, and by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., under grants NSC 90-2213-E-260-007 and NSC 91-2213-E-260-021. This paper is an extended version of Du et al. [2003]. Authors' addresses: W. Du, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University; email: wedu@ecs.syr.edu; J. Deng, University of New Orleans; Y. S. Han, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taipei University, Sanshia, Taipai county, Taiwan, ROC; email: yshan@mail.ntpu.edu.tw; P. K. Varshney, Syracuse University; J. Katz and A. Khalili, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212)  • 229 the number of compromised nodes is less than the threshold, the probability that communications between any additional nodes are compromised is close to zero. This desirable property lowers the initial payoff of smaller-scale network breaches to an adversary, and makes it necessary for the adversary to attack a large fraction of the network before it can achieve any significant gain.
Du et al. proposed a new key pre-distribution scheme REF , which significantly improves the resilience of the network compared to the existing schemes.
A pairwise key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks
TSEC
Computer Science