An Improved Multi-path Key Establishment under REM Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A unconditionally secure message transmission scheme (USMT) is used to address the problem of multi-path key establishment in wireless sensor networks under Reveal-Erase-Modify (REM) attacks. Various analyses demonstrate that, relaxing the integrity condition by allowing a small probability of error without disrupting perfect secrecy and availability as satisfied in our scheme, leads to significant improvements in REM resilient key establishment schemes. However, the introduced integrity error probability affects the protocol regardless of the adversaries’ strategies and cannot be regarded as a point of failure. This randomization in integrity also enhances the security performance of the WSNs employed in hostile environments by improving the tolerable threshold of the key establishment scheme to half of the established paths between two sensor nodes. The proposed algorithm is simulated over a wireless sensor network. The simulation result confirms REM resilience improvement in comparison with previous key establishment protocols.