An efficient key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor network using public key cryptography

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consist of sensor nodes which are tiny, low power, computationally limited and battery constrained electromechanical devices. To provide security for WSN it is necessary to encrypt the message sent among communicating nodes. Sensor nodes need to agree on an encryption key to establish a secure communication. However, achieving such key agreement in a resource constrained environment like WSN is not a trivial task as security protocols always require additional overhead on the computational, storage and energy resources. Several key agreement schemes have been proposed so far to ensure security in WSN. Some of the schemes are very effective in terms of security, but quite complex to apply in real world sensor network environment. Considering the feature of sensor node, in this paper we propose a key pre-distribution scheme that exploits the public key cryptography to establish a secure key agreement among communicating nodes in sensor network. Evaluation of the proposed scheme shows that the performance (e.g. memory usage, resource consumption, resiliency against node capture, resistance against node replication, scalability) of WSN can be substantially improved while achieving a sufficient level of security. The proposed public key cryptography based key pre-distribution and detailed performance analysis of the proposed scheme is presented in this paper.