Technical Reports

The report FIMU-RS-2007-05

Key Distribution and Secrecy Amplification in Wireless Sensor Networks

by Petr ©venda, Václav Matyá¹, November 2007, 63 pages.

FIMU-RS-2007-05. Available as Postscript, PDF.

Abstract:

This report targets the area of wireless sensor networks, and in particular their security. Probabilistic key pre-distribution schemes were developed to deal with limited memory of a single node and high number of potential neighbours. We present a new idea of group support for authenticated key exchange that substantially increases the resilience of an underlaying probabilistic key pre-distribution scheme against the threat of node capturing. We also propose a new method for automatic protocol generation which utilizes Evolutionary Algorithms (EA). The approach is verified on the automatic generation of secrecy amplification protocols for wireless sensor networks. All human-designed secrecy amplification protocols proposed so far were re-invented by the method. A new protocol with better fraction of secure links was evolved. An alternative construction of secrecy amplification protocol was designed which exhibits only linear (instead of exponential) increase of needed messages when the number of communication neighbours is growing. As a message transmission is a battery expensive operation, this more efficient protocol can significantly save this resource.