Noninteractive pairwise key establishment for sensor networks

As a security primitive, key establishment plays the most crucial role in the design of the security mechanisms. Unfortunately, the resource limitation of sensor nodes poses a great challenge for designing an efficient and effective key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In spite of the fact that many elegant and clever solutions have been proposed, no practical key establishment scheme has emerged. In this paper, a ConstrAined Random Perturbation-based pairwise keY establishment (CARPY) scheme and its variant, a CARPY+ scheme, for WSNs, are presented. Compared to all existing schemes which satisfy only some requirements in so-called sensor-key criteria, including 1) resilience to the adversary's intervention, 2) directed and guaranteed key establishment, 3) resilience to network configurations, 4) efficiency, and 5) resilience to dynamic node deployment, the proposed CARPY+ scheme meets all requirements. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, CARPY+ is the first noninteractive key establishment scheme with great resilience to a large number of node compromises designed for WSNs. We examine the CARPY and CARPY+ schemes from both the theoretical and experimental aspects. Our schemes have also been practically implemented on the TelosB compatible mote to evaluate the corresponding performance and overhead.