A new class of Hash-Chain based key pre-distribution schemes for WSN

In the last decade, we witness a proliferation of potential application domains of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Therefore, a host of research works have been conducted by both academic and industrial communities. Nevertheless, given the sensitivity of the potential applications that are generally tightly related to the physical world and may be human beings, a large scale deployment of WSN depends on the dependability provided by these emerging networks. Particularly, security emerges as a challenging issue in WSN because of the resource limitations. Key management is one of the required building blocks of many security services, such as confidentiality, authentication, etc. Unfortunately, public key based solutions, which provide efficient key management services in conventional networks, are unsuitable for WSN because of resource limitations. Symmetric key establishment is then one of the most suitable paradigms for securing wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle the resiliency of symmetric key pre-distribution schemes against node capture. We propose a hash-based mechanism which enhances the resiliency of key pre-distribution for WSN. Applied to existing key predistribution schemes, our solution gives birth to enhanced schemes which are more resilient against node capture attacks. We analyze and compare our solution against the existing schemes, with respect to some important criteria such as: the network resiliency against node capture, secure connectivity coverage, storage requirement, communication overhead and computation complexity. We show through analytical analysis that our solution enhances the network resiliency without introducing any new storage or communication overheads. Moreover, we show that our solution introduces insignificant computational overhead.