A Byzantine resilient multi-path key establishment scheme and its robustness analysis for sensor networks

Sensor networks are composed of a large number of low power sensor devices. For secure communication among sensors, secret keys must be established between them. Random key predistribution and pairwise key establishment schemes have been proposed for key management in large-scale sensor networks. In these schemes, after being deployed, sensors set up pairwise keys via preinstalled keys. The key establishment schemes are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, i.e., packet dropping or altering. To counter these attacks, we propose a Byzantine resilient multi-path key establishment scheme that uses the Reed-Solomon error-correct coding scheme to improve resilience to Byzantine attacks. Our proposed scheme can tolerate almost t faulty key paths, where t = (n - k)/2 when (n, k) Reed-Solomon error-correct coding scheme is used. In addition, by using the Reed-solomon coding scheme, sensors can identify the faulty paths with minimal communication overhead.