A New Scalable Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for WSN

Given the sensitivity of the potential WSN applications, security emerges as a challenging issue in these networks. Because of the resource limitations, symmetric key establishment is one favorite paradigm for securing WSN. One of the main concerns when designing a key management scheme for WSN is the network scalability. Indeed, the protocol should support a large number of nodes to enable a large scale deployment of the network. In this paper, we propose a new highly scalable key establishment scheme for WSN. For that purpose, we make use, for the first time, of the unital design theory. We show that the basic mapping from unitals to pairwise key establishment allows to achieve an extremely high network scalability while degrading the key sharing probability. Then, we propose a new unital-based key pre-distribution approach which provides high network scalability and good key sharing probability. We conduct analytical analysis to compare our solutions to existing ones, the obtained results show that our approach enhances the network scalability while providing good overall performances. Also, we show that our solutions reduce significantly the storage overhead at equal network size compared to existing solutions.