A Review of Pairwise Key Establishment Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt and authenticate messages sent among sensor nodes. Keys for encryption and authentication purposes must be agreed upon by communicating nodes. Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is non-trivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Dife-Hellman and public-key based schemes, are not suit-able for wireless sensor networks. Pre-distribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of mem-ory used when the network size is large. To solve the key pre-distribution problem, two elegant key pre-distribution approaches have been proposed recently [11, 7].