Wireless sensor networks are usually applied in hostile areas where nodes can easily be monitored and captured by an adversary. Designing a key distribution scheme with high security and reliability, low hardware requirements, and moderate communication load is crucial for wireless sensor networks. To address the above objectives, we propose a new key distribution scheme based on an ECC asymmetric encryption algorithm. The two-way authentication mechanism in the proposed scheme not only prevents illegal nodes from accessing the network, but also prevents fake base stations from communicating with the nodes. The complete key distribution and key update methods ensure the security of session keys in both static and dynamic environments. The new key distribution scheme provides a significant performance improvement compared to the classical key distribution schemes for wireless sensor networks without sacrificing reliability. Simulation results show that the proposed new scheme reduces the communication load and key storage capacity, has significant advantages in terms of secure connectivity and attack resistance, and is fully applicable to wireless sensor networks.

Wireless sensor networks are usually applied in hostile areas where nodes are easy to be moni-tored and captured by adversary. Key distribution is an essential primitive to provide most of security mechanism. However, the characteristic of limited resources of sensors restricts the direct use of conventional key distribution schemes. In this paper, a complete security key distribution scheme based on asymmetric cryptography technology is proposed in both static and mobile scenarios. Mutual authentication is guaranteed using challenge-response mechanism. The per-formance evaluation and security analysis show that the proposed scheme with low complexity not only provides better security for wireless sensor networks, but also reduces storage overhead and key exposure risks.

Because of the movements of sensor nodes and unknown mobility pattern, how to ensure two communicating (static or mobile) nodes authenticate and share a pairwise key is important. In this paper, we propose a mutual-authenticated key distribution scheme based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) for dynamic sensor networks. Compared with traditional key predistribution schemes, the proposal reduces the storage overhead and the key exposure risks and thereby improves the resilience against node capture attacks. Mutual authentication is provided by the PUF challenge-response mechanism. However, the PUF response is not transmitted in plain forms so as to resist the modelling attacks, which is vulnerable in some existing PUF-based schemes. We demonstrate the proposed scheme to improve the secure connectivity and other performances by analysis and experiments.