Trust establishment in wireless sensor networks

Trust establishment has long been a challenging problem in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to high security requirements and strict resource constraints in WSNs. Recent approaches based on randomized key pre-distribution schemes mainly focus on key allocations supported by the pre-deployment estimations of the post-deployment information items. Unfortunately, such information items may be unavailable or may change over time. The performance of the resulting network may be unstable and unable to react to the change of topology due to sensor node dynamics. We first present a detailed survey of recently proposed techniques for trust establishment in WSNs. Then, we introduce our novel key redistribution framework that exploits the key mobility concept, designed based on adaptability to post-deployment contexts. We show that our framework can be applied to most existing key pre-distribution schemes (both key-based and polynomial-based) to further improve their performance. To fight against node capture attacks, we also proposed a recovering scheme, namely, node replenishment scheme, to replace the compromised links and the functions of the compromised region. Analytical and simulation results indicate that our proposed work are practical and able to improve the performance of a WSN significantly with a small amount of additional resources.