Resilient key establishment for mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are self-organizing and resource-constrained networks composed of battery-powered small devices called sensor nodes. WSNs are typically deployed in unattended areas. In order to secure WSNs, firstly cryptographic keys must be distributed in a secure and robust way. Key distribution problem is extensively studied for static WSNs, but has not been studied widely for mobile WSNs (MWSN) in the literature. In this paper we propose a key distribution mechanism for MWSNs in which both sensor nodes and the BS are mobile. In our scheme BS acts as a mobile key distribution center which distributes pairwise keys to sensor nodes in a single hop. Our performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme outperforms mobile versions of two existing schemes in the literature. Moreover, our scheme has perfect resilience against node capture attacks.