A strong key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

A prerequisite for secure communication between two sensor nodes is that the nodes should share a session key to bootstrap their trust relationship. The open problems are how to set up a session key between communicating nodes, and how to minimize any information about the keys disclosed to the other side during key agreement. Almost schemes one of the existing protocols cannot perfectly solve above problems due to some drawbacks. Accordingly, we propose a strong key pre-distribution scheme having the following merits. First, it supports authentication services. Second, as each node can only find w (=[W/2]) keys of secret keys (i.e. W) that shared with other side, without revealing the unshared key information, it substantially improves resilience of network against node capture. Our scheme is based on the MRS scheme. Performance and security analyses have proven that our scheme is suitable for sensor networks in terms of performance and security aspects.