Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 30, Issues 11–12, 10 September 2007, Pages 2365-2374
Computer Communications

Pair-wise path key establishment in wireless sensor networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2007.04.021Get rights and content

Abstract

When sensor networks deployed in unattended and hostile environments, for securing communication between sensors, secret keys must be established between them. Many key establishment schemes have been proposed for large scale sensor networks. In these schemes, each sensor shares a secret key with its neighbors via preinstalled keys. But it may occur that two end nodes which do not share a key with each other could use a secure path to share a secret key between them. However during the transmission of the secret key, the secret key will be revealed to each node along the secure path. Several researchers proposed a multi-path key establishment to prevent a few compromised sensors from knowing the secret key, but it is vulnerable to stop forwarding or Byzantine attacks. To counter these attacks, we propose a hop by hop authentication scheme for path key establishment to prevent Byzantine attacks. Compared to conventional protocols, our proposed scheme can mitigate the impact of malicious nodes from doing a Byzantine attack and sensor nodes can identify the malicious nodes. In addition, our scheme can save energy since it can detect and filter false data not beyond two hops.

Introduction

Security is an important requirement in many sensor network applications, especially in unattended and often hostile environments such as battlefield surveillance, friendly forces monitoring, and biological attack detection. Since wireless sensor networks are much easier for an adversary to eavesdrop any packet transmitted on the channel, it is necessary for two neighboring nodes to share a secret key to encrypt sensitive data and authenticate peer-to-peer communication. Furthermore, sensor nodes are typically small battery-equipped devices with very limited communication, computation, and memory capacity. Traditional key establishment techniques like public key cryptosystem (e.g. RSA) [20], [23] are impractical.

One practical solution is key pre-distribution, in which keys have to be installed onto sensors before deployment so that nodes can use shared keys to conduct secure communication. Using the key pre-distribution scheme to establish a secret key has two extreme examples. One example is where each sensor node is preloaded with N  1 pair-wise keys before deployment, such that it shares with any node a secret key, where N is the number of nodes in the networks. This scheme offers the most security since no key information will be known between sensor pairs from a compromised node. However, this scheme is not suitable for large networks, since a sensor may need to store thousands of keys, which increase linearly with network size. The other extreme example is where all sensor nodes use the same master key in the network. The advantage of this scheme is that a sensor node needs only a master key regardless of the network size. However, this scheme suffers low security, since if one of the sensor nodes is compromised, the communication of the entire network will be known.

To overcome the disadvantage of the above schemes, several key pre-distribution schemes have been recently proposed [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. The Random Key Pre-distribution scheme (RKP) was first proposed in [1] for large-scale sensor networks. In this scheme, each node randomly picks m keys from a large key pool, such that any two sensor nodes will share at least one common key with a certain probability. The q-composite key pre-distribution scheme [2] requires two sensors that share at least q (q > 1) pre-distributed keys in order to establish a common key. This improves resilience against node capture attacks. However, both schemes [1], [2] are vulnerable to nodes compromise attack because a small number of compromised nodes may expose a large fraction of common keys between the non-compromised nodes. The Threshold-Based Key Pre-distribution (TBKP) techniques were developed in [3], [4] to improve [1], [2] drawback. After the sensor nodes are deployed, a unique pair-wise key can be established between any pair of neighboring nodes. When the number of compromised sensors becomes less than a threshold, any other keys shared between non-compromised sensors will not be affected. Key pre-distribution schemes based on knowing sensor deployment knowledge were proposed in [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. This deployment knowledge can further reduce memory requirement of sensor nodes and enhance network resilience against node compromises. The PIKE scheme proposed in [10] addressed the problem of high density deployment requirements in RKP and TBKP. Multi-path pair-wise key establishment protocols [2], [11], [12], [13], [19] were proposed to enhance path-key establishment security by preventing compromised sensor nodes on the single communication path from knowing the established pair-wise key.

The path key exposure problem was introduced in [8]. The problem described a scenario when nodes without a common key to other nodes in the network are required to establish a key through a secure path. So a path key will be used to establish a secret key between two nodes, path key means that key is transmitted using secure communication channel through one or more sensor nodes. However, a secret key may be exposed if one of the nodes along the path is compromised. Some multi-path key establishment protocols were proposed in [2], [11], [12], [13], [19] to solve the path key exposure problem. Establishing a path key by multiple secure paths can significantly decrease the risk of the path key being revealed between a source node and a destination node. But these schemes still have some drawbacks. Since adversaries can launch various inside attacks, they can compromise sensor nodes in any one of multi-paths. For examples, they might alter, spoof, or drop information to disrupt the normal operation of the sensor network. Moreover, adversaries may inject bogus data into the network to consume scarce network resources. So far, these proposed schemes cannot detect and identify the malicious behavior nodes.

In this paper, we propose a pair-wise path key establishment scheme through a multi-path approach to improve the security of path key establishment. In our scheme, a secret key K is partitioned into m key segments by a source node and then is sent to a destination through n node-disjoint paths. A destination node can receive enough key segments to reconstruct the secret key K. So even if a small number of nodes are compromised, the secret key as a whole is not compromised. Besides, a hop by hop authentication method is used to detect false key segments and malicious nodes in each node disjoint path. We designed this scheme to filter bogus traffic injected by adversaries during early transmission stages and to save precious energy. We show through analysis that our scheme is highly secure against node capture, and outperforms other schemes when preventing various attacks in wireless sensor networks.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces related work and background knowledge used in the paper. Section 3 presents our protocols. Section 4 compares the performance of our protocol with previous work. Section 5 concludes this paper.

Section snippets

Related work

Recently, path key establishment schemes, which send key segments with multiple paths have been proposed in [12], [13], [19]. These schemes use multiple physical paths or logical paths forwarding. This way, they aim to reduce the secret key from being known when a compromised node is on the paths. However, when a malicious node modifies or stops forwarding the key value, these schemes fail to obtain the original value. The authors in [12] proposed end-to-end pair-wise key establishment using

Pair-wise path key establishment protocol

This section presents our path key establishment scheme. Our protocol is aimed to prevent active attacks such as the stop forwarding and Byzantine attacks that adversaries may use the compromised nodes to alter messages and prevent the key establishment. We need an authentication mechanism to prevent the active attacks. Our protocol consists of two phases. The first phase runs a group-based key pre-distribution scheme. The nodes are partitioned into a number of groups. The nodes within a same

Security analysis and performance evaluation

Here, we analyze the security and performance of our protocol. In [12], the authors used redundant packets to prevent stop forwarding attacks happening. In our protocol, we use the (t, n) secret sharing scheme and hop by hop authentication to mitigate this attack. Hence, we can partially prevent this attack. The Byzantine attack is a malicious behavior node that alters the forwarding key to prevent the receiver from establishing a key. In our protocol, we use hop by hop authentication method to

Conclusion

Many random key pre-distribution schemes have been developed recently to establish pair-wise keys for wireless sensor networks. But these previous schemes have a drawback in establishing a path key, which may lead to per hop key exposure problems if a node along the path is compromised. Although a number of recent research efforts have addressed this problem, most of them cannot prevent stop forwarding or Byzantine attacks. In our approach, we developed a pair-wise path key establishment scheme

Jang-Ping Sheu received the B.S. degree in computer science from Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1981, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University. He was a Chair of Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University

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    Jang-Ping Sheu received the B.S. degree in computer science from Tamkang University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1981, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. He is currently a Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University. He was a Chair of Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University from 1997 to 1999. He was a Director of Computer Center, National Central University from 2003 to 2006. His current research interests include wireless communications and mobile computing.

    He was an associate editor of Journal of the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering, Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers, and Journal of Internet Technology. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, and International Journal of Sensor Networks.

    He received the Distinguished Research Awards of the National Science Council of the Republic of China in 1993–1994, 1995–1996, and 1997–1998. He received the Distinguished Engineering Professor Award of the Chinese Institute of Engineers in 2003. He received the certificate of Distinguished Professorship, National Central University in 2005. He received the K.-T. Li Research Breakthrough Award of the Institute of Information and Computing Machinery. Dr. Sheu is a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, and Phi Tau Phi Society.

    Jui-Che Cheng received the B.S. degree in computer science and information engineering from Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 2004 and the M.S. degree in computer science and information engineering from National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan, Republic of China, in 2006, respectively. His current research interests include security in wireless sensor networks and mobile computing.

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