HGKM: A group-based key management scheme for sensor networks using deployment knowledge

Key establishment plays a central role in authentication and encryption in wireless sensor networks, especially when they are mainly deployed in hostile environments. Because of the strict constraints in power, processing and storage, designing an efficient key establishment protocol is not a trivial task. Compare with traditional public key cryptography, symmetric key cryptographic with key predistribution mechanism is more suitable for large-scale wireless sensor networks. Most of previous solutions have some issues on performance and security capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel key predistribution model using pre-deployment knowledge to take advantage in terms of network connectivity, resilience against node compromised, memory requirement and energy for transmission.