A Pairwise Key Management Scheme Based on Hash Function for Wireless Sensor Networks

Establishment of pairwise keys in wireless sensor networks is a fundamental security service, which forms the basis of other security services such as authentication and encryption. However, due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, establishing pairwise keys in wireless sensor networks is not a trivial task. For the existing key pre-distribution schemes, as the number of compromised nodes increasing, the fraction of affected pairwise keys will increase quickly. As a result, a small number of compromised nodes may affect a large fraction of pairwise. This paper presents an improved key management scheme for wireless sensor networks, which take advantage of one-way hash function to alleviate the effect of compromised sensor nodes on the uncompromised sensor nodes and at the same time this method doesn't affect the connectivity between neighboring sensor nodes. The analysis shows that compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme has better network resilience against node capture attack.