Home // ICWMC 2012, The Eighth International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications // View article

A Fast and Efficient Key Agreement Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors:
Mee Loong Yang
Adnan al-Anbuky
William Liu

Keywords: Blom’s scheme; ad hoc networks; security; wireless sensor networks; key pre-distribution

Abstract:
The Blom’s scheme for key agreement between pairs of nodes requires exchange of a small amount of bits, uses simple computations, and also authenticates each other. This makes it attractive for use in Wireless Sensor Networks but, in its original form, it has limitations because of the contending requirements for large pairwise keys and limited memory in the nodes. Our implementation of the Blom’s scheme uses multiple keys, enabling it to derive large pairwise keys using the limited memory resources, while retaining all the desirable features of speed, compactness, and low energy usage. We implemented our scheme in a MICAz mote and present some experimental results on the memory, computation time, and energy requirements. We compared the performance with other public key cryptographic methods used in WSN. Our scheme, using 382 bytes of RAM, was able to compute 128-bits pairwise keys in times ranging from 34 ms to 1.9 s for networks with capture thresholds of 32 and about 2,000 nodes respectively.

Pages: 231 to 237

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: June 24, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4219

ISBN: 978-1-61208-203-5

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from June 24, 2012 to June 29, 2012