Private key agreement and secure communication for heterogeneous sensor networks

Abstract: Key management is an important building block for all security operations in sensor networks. Most existing key management schemes try to establish shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors; hence, a large number of keys need to be preloaded on each sensor, which necessitates a large key space for the nodes in the network. The recent trend in research is to mainly consider homogeneous sensor networks, and to a lesser degree heterogeneous sensor networks, for key management. In this paper, we propose a novel key agreement protocol which is based on pairing-based cryptography over an elliptic curve. Using this protocol, any two nodes that need to communicate can independently compute the same secret key by using pairing and identity-based encryption properties. The proposed protocol significantly reduces the key space of a node. Additionally, the security analysis of the proposed protocol shows that it is robust against a number of attacks including wormhole attack, masquerade attacks, reply attacks, and message manipulation attacks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]