A scalable and efficient key establishment protocol for wireless sensor networks

An essential requirement for providing secure services in wireless sensor networks is the ability to establish pairwise keys among sensors. Due to resource constraints on the sensors, the key establishment scheme should not impose significant overhead on them. To date, several key establishment schemes have been proposed. Some of these have appropriate connectivity and resistance against key exposure, but the resources needed in the sensors is substantial. Others are appropriate from the resource consumption perspective, but have weak performance. This paper proposes a key establishment protocol based on symmetric polynomials. To improve performance, the protocol uses a new model to distribute key information among sensors. The main feature of the proposed protocol is a tradeoff between performance and resource consumption. Additionally, the proposed scheme is able to establish a common key between every pair of nodes. Analysis shows that the proposed solution has good performance compared to established approaches.