Two Variations of Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks

Recently, the issue pertinent to sensor network security is a popular topic. Especially, due to the restriction of energy supplied by battery power of the sensors, symmetric cryptography is one of the suitable choices for the secret communication between sensors, while asymmetric cryptography is not appropriate because of its heavy loading on computation should consume a lot of energy. As a result of using symmetric cryptography, there are numerous research papers focusing on designing efficient key management scheme in sensor networks. PIKE designed by Chan and Perrig is a scheme using peer intermediaries and their pre-installed keys to deliver secret message from one sensor to another. However, they did not consider the case that the sensors are scattered in nonuniform way. Moreover, O(logn) is enough for sensor networks to achieve expander topology while PIKE has O(√n) storage overhead. This article gives generalizations of PIKE to offer more choices for developers under different requirements. The Constant Storage Protocol, abbreviated as CSP, costs constant memory storage and is more suitable for group-based deployment.