Network Coding Protocols for Secret Key Distribution

Recent contributions have uncovered the potential of network coding, i.e. algebraic mixing of multiple information flows in a network, to provide enhanced security in packet oriented wireless networks. We focus on exploiting network coding for secret key distribution in a sensor network with a mobile node. Our main contribution is a set of extensions for a simple XOR based scheme, which is shown to enable pairwise keys, cluster keys, key revocation and mobile node authentication, while providing an extra line of defense with respect to attacks on the mobile node. Performance evaluation in terms of security metrics and resource utilization is provided, as well as a basic implementation of the proposed scheme. We deem this class of network coding protocols to be particularly well suited for highly constrained dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks.