Secure pairwise key establishment in large-scale sensor networks: An area partitioning and multigroup key predistribution approach

Existing pairwise key establishment schemes for large-scale sensor networks are vulnerable to various passive or active attacks. We classify attacks as selective node capture attacks, node fabrication attacks, and insider attacks. In order to improve the security robustness of random key predistribution and pairwise key establishment schemes against these attacks, we propose a five-phase pairwise key predistribution and pairwise key establishment approach by using area partitioning and multigroup key predistribution. Our security performance studies show that our proposed approach is resilient to selective node capture and node fabrication attacks, and restricts the consequence of any insider attack to a minimal level.