Smart dust security - key infection revisited

Sensor network, key management, key infection, key predistribution, smart dust, amplification, protocol

Sensor network is a notion denoting an interesting subset of self-organising wireless networks. These networks are rather dense as each node have typically more than dozen neighbours, and large with tens to hundreds thousands of nodes. Applications of such networks assume distributed environmental sensing performed by each sensor in the network, where data from a particular sensor gain value only when combined with data from a relatively high number of other sensors. One of the open security questions in this specific environment is a possibility to lower requirements on key distribution and key management and thus decrease production costs. One of the possible ways is ``key infection''. The paper recaps a protocol and already published results. It also elaborates the concept of key infection by introducing a new variant of security amplification protocol, and presents some interesting results obtained by simulations.