Framework design and performance analysis on pairwise key establishment

Abstract

Pairwise key establishment provides an effective way to build secure communication links among sensor nodes using cryptographic techniques. Up till now, researchers have devised numerous schemes that employ diverse cryptographic or combinatoric methods in order to provide high security, high connectivity and low storage overheads on the sensors. In this paper, we present a new framework on pairwise key establishment. We show that it can encompass most of the major previous schemes. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of the previous schemes using the proposed framework. When 100% connectivity is provided, under the same storage overhead on the sensor nodes, Blundo scheme and Blum scheme provide the highest security against intelligent adversaries while YG-L scheme is the best against random adversaries. When connectivity is under 100%, for random adversaries, location-aware schemes provide better security than non-location based schemes whereas for intelligent adversaries, all location based schemes' security is less than that of other schemes.