Author: | M. Zitterbart, E. Blaß | links: | DownloadBibtex |
---|---|---|---|
Source: | ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security, pp. 303-310, Taipei, Taiwan, March 2006 | ||
Key establishment is a fundamental prerequisite for secure
communication in wireless sensor networks. A new node joining the
network needs to efficiently and autonomously set up secret keys with
his communication partners without the use of a central
infrastructure. Most cited current research papers focus on a
probabilistic distribution of sets of keys from larger key
pools to new nodes. This results in unnecessary expensive
communication and memory consumption, growing linearly with the size
of the network, and guarantees secure connections only with a certain
probability. This work presents a novel approach for efficient and
secure key establishment of nodes joining the network by utilizing the
fact that communication in sensor networks follows a paradigm called
aggregation. Keys are split into shares and forwarded using
disjoint paths in the network. The approach is self-organizing and
minimizes memory consumption as well as radio transmissions
efficiently -- down to logarithmic behavior.