Security and Key Establishment Schemes for Distributed Sensor Networks

In this chapter we study the security and key establishment schemes for distributed sensor networks (DSNs). Our approach is that first we provide an overview of all the research directions that constitute the security in DSNs. These include attacks, cryptography, key management, secure routing, secure applications, and intrusion detection. Then we will discuss in more detail about how the key agreement problem has been tackled via the investigation of key establishment and pre-distribution schemes. Finally, we will propose a new pairwise key establishment scheme for clustered DSNs. This scheme is shown to have desired security properties and be highly efficient, cost effective, and practical for resource-constrained sensor nodes