TinyAKE: A More Practicable and Trustable Scheme for Authenticated Key Establishment in WSNs
This work addresses security challenges in resource-constrained WSNs, offering a more practicable solution for sensor network deployments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing key establishment principles.
The authors tackled the problem of authenticated key establishment in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) by proposing TinyAKE, a protocol based on lightweight certificates, which improves practicability and trustability compared to existing protocols, with experimental results showing feasibility and optimal repeated negotiation for enhanced connectivity.
The characteristics of high loss rate, resource constraint, being eager for good security haven't been fully considered in the existing key establishment protocols of wireless sensor networks. Analyzing the key establishing problem from the MAC and physical layers, existing protocols are not practicable enough due to their overlong agreement packets and single round key establishment. To mitigate the impact of these problems, a group of design principles for secure sensor networks has been presented and TinyAKE, an authenticated key transport protocol based on lightweight certificate, is proposed in this paper. The security of TinyAKE are proved with the theory of indistinguishability, meanwhile, the correctness is also proved, the performance is analyzed and compared with the existing similar protocols. Finally TinyAKE is implemented in the TinyOS with TinyECC. Our evaluation shows that TinyAKE is a more practicable and trustable authenticated key establishment protocol than existing protocols. The experimental result shows that the key transport with certificate mechanism is feasible in WSNs. Moreover, the simulation results show that the optimal number of repeated negotiation is one when the secure connectivity rate of TinyAKE is improved by using the repeated key negotiation.