An Identity-ased Random Key Pre-distribution Scheme for Direct Key Establishment to Prevent Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Key establishment in sensor networks is a challenging problem because of resource constraints of the sensors. The classical public-key routines are impractical in most sensor network architectures. In this paper, we propose a new random key pre-distribution scheme which is based on the identity-based approach for key establishment between two neighbor nodes in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed scheme provides better security against node capture, in particular, against node fabrication attack than the existing random key pre-distribution schemes. Moreover, our scheme has better trade-off between communication overhead, network connectivity and security against node capture compared to the existing random key pre-distribution schemes. In addition, our scheme supports dynamic node addition after initial deployment and also works for any deployment configuration.