Efficient ID-Based Threshold Random Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Security for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has become an increasingly serious concern due to the requirement level of applications and hostile deployment areas. To enable secure services, cryptographic keys must be agreed upon by communicating nodes. Unfortunately, due to resource constraints, the key agreement problem in wireless sensor networks has become quite complicated. To tackle this problem, many public-key unrelated proposals which are considered more reasonable in cost than public key based approaches have been proposed so far including random based key pre-distribution schemes. One prominent branch of these proposals is threshold random key pre-distribution schemes. However these schemes still introduce either communication overhead or both communication and computational overheads to resource constrained sensor nodes. Considering this issue, we propose an efficient ID-based threshold random key pre-distribution scheme that not only retains all the highly desirable properties of the schemes including high probability of establishing pairwise keys, tolerance of node compromise but also significantly reduces communication and computational costs of each node. The proposed scheme is validated by a thorough analysis in terms of network resiliency and related overheads. In addition, we also propose a supplementary method to significantly improve the security of pairwise keys established indirectly. key words: ID-based, random key pre-distribution, key agreement, threshold, security, wireless sensor networks