Mission-Guided Key Management for Ad Hoc Sensor Network

Ad hoc Sensor Networks (ASNs) are ad-hoc mobile networks that consist of sensor nodes with limited computation and communication capabilities. Because ASNs may be deployed in hostile areas, where communication is monitored and nodes are subject to be captured by an adversary, ASNs need a cryptographic protection of communications and sensor-capture detection. According to that the ASN is deployed to carry out some certain tasks, we present a mission-guided key-management scheme. In our scheme, a key ring, which consisting of randomly chosen k keys from a sub-pool of a large offline-generated pool of P keys, is pre-distributed to each sensor node of a group. Compared with Laurent’s scheme, our scheme improves the probability that a shared key exists between two sensor nodes of the same group, and doesn’t affect its security.