Sensornet - A Key Predistribution Scheme for Distributed Sensors using Nets

Key management is an essential functionality for developing secure cryptosystems; particularly for implementations to low cost devices of a distributed sensor networks (DSN)–a prototype of Internet of Things (IoT). Low cost leads to constraints in various resources of constituent devices of a IoT (sensors of a DSN); thereby restricting implementations of computationally heavy public key cryptosystems. This leads to adaptation of the novel key predistribution trick in symmetric key platform to efficiently tackle the problem of key management for these resource starved networks. After a few initial proposals based on random graphs, most key predistribution schemes (KPS) use deterministic (combinatorial) approaches to assure essential design properties. Combinatorial designs like a (v,b,r,k)−configuration which forms a μ(v,b,r,k)−CID are effective schemes to design KPS (Lee and Stinson, 2005). A net in a vector space is a set of cosets of certain kind of subspaces called partial spread. A μ(v,b,r,k)−CID can be formed from a net. In this paper, we propose a key predistribution scheme for DSN, named as sensornet, using net. Effectiveness of sensornet in term of crucial metrics in comparison to other prominent schemes has been theoretically established.