Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

DOI

10.1080/15501320601062114

Publication Title

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Volume

5

Issue

2

Pages

139-157

Abstract

Designing secure sensor networks is difficult. We propose an approach that uses multicast communications and requires fewer encryptions than pairwise communications. The network is partitioned into multicast regions; each region is managed by a sensor node chosen to act as a keyserver. The keyservers solicit nodes in their neighborhood to join the local multicast tree. The keyserver generates a binary tree of keys to maintain communication within the multicast region using a shared key. Our approach supports a distributed key agreement protocol that identifies the compromised keys and supports membership changes with minimum system overhead. We evaluate the overhead of our approach by using the number of messages and encryptions to estimate power consumption. Using data from field tests of a military surveillance application, we show that our multicast approach needs fewer encryptions than pair-wise keying approaches. We also show that this scheme is capable of thwarting many common attacks.

Original Publication Citation

Brooks, R.R., Pillai, B., Pirretti, M., & Weigle, M.C. (2009). Multicast encryption infrastructure for security in sensor networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 5(2), 139-157. doi: 10.1080/15501320601062114

ORCID

0000-0002-2787-7166 (Weigle)

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