Revisiting key-swapping collusion attack on distributed sensor networks

Recent study has demonstrated that quite a few well-know pairwise key establishment schemes are susceptible to key-swapping collusion attack aiming to subvert crucial applications that require cooperative efforts, e.g., data fusion algorithms, routing protocols, etc. Previous works against this attack have shown their own limitations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new countermeasure in this paper. Our approach makes good use of symmetric-key cryptographic primitives and a hidden one-way hash chain to avoid unreasonable assumptions and/or costly methods, and guarantee network scalability. The intensive security analysis reveals that the countermeasure eliminates the possibility of the attack under normal conditions with only a tiny increase in under the worst case. This susceptibility can be eliminated by some additional mechanisms. Lastly, performance overheads are well justified by theoretical analyses and simulation to be suitable for current sensor node generations. © 2010 IEEE