A novel key management scheme for wireless embedded systems

Abstract

Wireless Embedded Systems (WEBs) has attracted significant interest in recent years, for instance, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), have recently been in the limelight for many domains. The characteristics of WEBs have imposed various restrictions on their system designs. Since embedded systems usually are developed by low-cost hardware, one major challenge in the development of many WEBs applications is to provide high-security features with limited resources. In this paper, we propose a novel key establishment scheme, named half-key scheme that based on the well-known random key pre-distribution scheme and DDHV-D deployment knowledge to provide resource-efficient key management in WEBs with reduced memory space requirements and better security enforcement. The capability of the proposed approach is evaluated by an analytical model and a series of experiments.