Creating and sharing knowledge for telecommunications

A Network Coding Approach to Secret Key Distribution

Oliveira, P. F. ; Barros, J.

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Vol. 3, Nº 3, pp. 414 - 423, September, 2008.

ISSN (print): 1556-6013
ISSN (online): 1556-6021

Scimago Journal Ranking: 1,06 (in 2008)

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TIFS.2008.928538

Abstract
We consider the problem of secret key distribution in a sensor network with multiple scattered sensor nodes and a mobile device that can be used to bootstrap the network. Our main contribution is a set of secure protocols that rely on simple network coding operations to provide a robust and lowcomplexity solution for sharing secret keys among sensor nodes, including pairwise keys, cluster keys, key revocation and mobile node authentication. In spite of its role as a key enabler for this approach, the mobile node only has access to an encrypted version of the keys, providing information-theoretic security with respect to attacks focused on the mobile node. Our results include performance evaluation in terms of security metrics and a detailed analysis of resource utilization. The basic scheme was implemented and tested in a real-life sensor network testbed. We deem this class of network coding protocols to be particularly well suited for highly constrained dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks.