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Leveraging Channel Diversity for Key Establishment in Wireless Sensor Networks

As the use of sensor networks increases, security in this domain becomes a very real concern. One fundamental aspect of providing confidentiality and authentication is key distribution. While public-key encryption has provided these properties historically, sensors are resource constrained and benefit from symmetric key approaches. In this work, we propose a novel protocol for symmetric key distribution that uses the multiple channels available on sensor hardware. This channel diversity, along with spatial diversity of device locations, allows neighboring sensors to establish secure link keys from plaintext keys that are broadcast by sensors in their neighborhood. In particular, we show that using even one extra channel during the initialization procedure significantly improves the security of key establishment. Via analysis and simulation, we show that our protocol performs well in terms of network connectivity and resilience to colluding malicious devices, when compared to previous work. We show that our protocol can achieve over 90% connectivity among neighboring sensors with link keys that are uncompromised even when 80% of the devices in the network are malicious and collude. Finally, we present a thorough discussion of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of our approach compared to previous techniques.