A General Pairwise Key Predistribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper develops a general hypercube-based key predistribution scheme for establishing pairwise keys between sensor nodes using polynomials, which is parameterized by the dimension of hypercube and the Hamming distance threshold variables. The scheme addresses the weaknesses of existing key predistribution schemes, which have either worse security or lower efficiency. It exhibits a nice property—when the Hamming distance between any two neighboring sensor nodes is less than the predefined threshold, the pairwise key can be established directly. Extensive performance and security analysis shows that by increasing Hamming distance threshold value, we can trade off the resilience against node capture attack for higher probability of direct pairwise key establishment, so as to save the energy consumption which is the most important issue for sensor networks.