Low-Cost Secret-Sharing in Sensor Networks

Radio waves are the medium used by sensors to communicate and exchange data. The unconstrained accessibility to any information carried over this medium is a security issue in many sensor-based applications. Ensuring protected wireless communications is a problem that has received a lot of attention in the context of ad hoc networks. However, due to hardware constraints of sensors along with multi-hop communication, most of these solutions turn out to be useless for sensor networks. This paper provides basic building blocks to establish secure communication by exchanging secret keys between neighbor nodes without any use of cryptography methods allowing an gain in efficiency. This paper also proposes a second algorithm that extends the secret key establishment to nodes that are not direct neighbors. Among the interesting features of the proposed algorithms we can note a low overhead and the absence of initial configuration.