Two Variations of Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks

1.1. Background

Sensor networks may be deployed at any area we want to monitor, including the hostile environment. Under this situation, the communication between any two sensors can be eavesdropped by the adversary to compromise the confidentiality of transmitted message. Thus, secure communication is an essential issue in sensor networks. To provide secure communication, exchanged message between sensor nodes should be encrypted and authenticated. In wireless sensor networks, sensors have limited energy supply that usually cannot be renewed. The lifetime of a sensor network is constrained by the amount of energy that sensors can use to perform operations such as sensing, processing, and transmission. When cryptography is used to ensure the confidentiality of transmitted data, the encryption/decryption procedure needs exquisite designs in order to save energy. Because asymmetric cryptography such as RSA or Elliptic Curve cryptography (ECC) needs extensive computations, they are usually considered to be unsuitable for resource-limited sensor networks (Eschenaur & Gligor, 2002). In this paper, we force on designing key management schemes to achieve secure communication in sensor networks.