A Network Coding Approach to Secret Key Distribution

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2008

Authors

P.F. Oliveira (Author) FEUP; Paulo F. Oliveira (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Vol. 3 No. 3

Pages: 414-423

ISSN: 1556-6013

Publisher: IEEE

Indexing

ISI Web of Science

Scopus

COMPENDEX

INSPEC

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology > Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

Other information

DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2008.928538

Abstract (EN): We consider the problem of secret key distribution in a sensor network with multiple scattered sensor nodes and a mobile device that can be used to bootstrap the network. Our main contribution is a set of secure protocols that rely on simple network coding operations to provide a robust and low-complexity solution for sharing secret keys among sensor nodes, including pairwise keys, cluster keys, key revocation, and mobile node authentication. Despite its role as a key enabler for this approach, the mobile node only has access to an encrypted version of the keys, providing information-theoretic security with respect to attacks focused on the mobile node. Our results include performance evaluation in terms of security metrics and a detailed analysis of resource utilization. The basic scheme was implemented and tested in a real-life sensor network testbed. We deem this class of network coding protocols to be particularly well suited for highly constrained dynamic systems such as wireless sensor networks.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific