Key Establishment for Securing Pervasive Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Technological growth in embedded systems has given a leading growth for pervasive computing in today’s human world. But the possibility of leakage of private information necessitates the need for security. Confidentiality service allows concealment of messages transmitted between communicating parties from the outsiders. To achieve confidentiality, it should be able to encrypt and decrypt the messages using a secret key. The key used must be agreed upon by the parties before start transmission. This chapter gives an overview of the issues in establishing a secret key, a scheme to establish the key and its implementation results. The scheme utilizes the fact that communication in sensor networks follows a paradigm called aggregation. Keys are split into shares and forwarded using disjoint paths in the network to reduce the effect of node compromise attack. The implementation results show that even though the scheme fits properly with the available memory with the sensor nodes, its communication overhead is high.