New Directions in Sensor Network Key Management

Sensor networks require efficient, low latency key management techniques that enable strong security and tolerance of node compromise. Conventional interactive approaches using public key certificate-based key management techniques are not communications efficient and are very time-consuming. Protocols that leverage elliptic curve cryptography reduce communications but still require considerable interactive exchange. Noninteractive techniques that leverage identity-based public-key cryptography show considerable promise, but these techniques are relatively immature and require considerable computations. Conversely, random key predistribution techniques reduce computations, but at the expense of many interactions. In this paper, we describe recent work in the cryptographic community that combines the benefits of both identity-based cryptography and random-key predistribution into a framework we call identity-based random-key predistribution (IBRKP). IBRKP establishes pair-wise keys with virtually no extra communications and provides security versus node memory trade-offs for the sensor network designer to engineer.