In-Situ Key Management in Sensor Networks

Speaker: Dr. Xiuzhen (Susan) Cheng, The George Washington University
Abstract: Secure communication is critical for many sensor network applications. Due to its efficiency, symmetric key cryptography is very attractive in sensor networks. However, establishing a shared key for communicating parties is challenging. The low computation capability and small storage capacity within sensors render many popular public-key based key distribution and management mechanisms impractical. Therefore researchers turn to seek protocols for key information predistribution. Nevertheless, the scalability of these schemes is often constrained by the conflict between the desired probability of sharing keys between two nodes and the resilience against node capture attack under a given storage budget per sensor for key-related information. In this talk, I will report iKMS and sKMS, two truly in-situ key management schemes for large-scale sensor networks, designed by the GWU MASNet Research Lab. In iKMS, service sensors, with each carrying a key space, and worker sensors, with no a priori knowledge, are deployed at the same time. Worker sensors obtain security information through an asymmetric secure channel from service nodes after deployment and then compute shared key with their neighbors. In sKMS, homogeneous sensors are preloaded with several system parameters and they differentiate their roles as either service nodes or worker nodes after deployment. Each service node constructs a key space based on Blom’s method, and distributes the key information to a number of worker sensors through a secure channel established by Rabin’s algorithm. S-KMS is “perfect” in against node capture attack, achieves high connectivity (close to 1) in the induced key-sharing graph, and consumes a small amount memory in worker sensors.
Biography: Xiuzhen (Susan) Cheng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the George Washington University. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Her current research interests include localization, key management, location-centric storage, and fault-tolerant information processing in sensor networks; routing in mobile ad hoc networks; and approximation algorithm design and analysis. She is an area editor for Ad Hoc Networks Journal and an editor for International Journal on Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing. She received the NSF CAREER Award in 2004.
Presented On: Friday, October 14, 2005
Videotape: <Not available.>