Energy Efficient Session Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Key distribution and management is the foundation of any secure services of wireless sensor networks. Due to the resource constraints, establishing cryptographic keys between communicating sensors in large-scale wireless sensor networks is a big challenge. Traditional asymmetric key cryptography is not suitable for wireless sensor environment because of its complexity. Based on the polynomial-key pre-distribution scheme, an improved session key establishment method is proposed in this paper. Compared with existing key distribution schemes, our proposed scheme has lower energy consumption, less key storage and lower communication overheads as well as better network resilience against node capture attacks.