A General Key Seed Management and Assignment Model for Wireless Sensor Networks and Application

To achieve security in distributed wireless sensor networks, one of the most promising approaches is the so-called random pre-distribution of key seeds. Pair-wise secure communication channels between nodes were established or discovered by using key seeds information that were constructed and pre-distribution to each node in distributed wireless sensor networks. A general key seeds management and assignment (KSMA) model is proposed, which is used to study the security of key pre-distribution schemes with five attributes for requirement of confidentiality and authentication. New key pre-distribution schemes based on new types of key seed are constructed within the framework of one-way accumulators, and new shared-key discovery protocols are presented. The discovery protocols are provably secure against the active adversaries in universally composable model. It is also shown how to set the parameters (pool and key-ring size) in such a way that the network is not only connected with high probability via secure links, but also new schemes are against Sybil attacks by using identity witness validated technique and achieving node-to-node identity authentication. New key pre-distribution scheme improves the resilience of the network compared with previous schemes, and an analysis of the scheme is given in terms of network resilience and associated overhead.