Cost Effective Hash Chain Based Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor network (WSN), a secure link in the key pre-distribution (KP) scheme may be compromised when sensor nodes are captured. Accordingly, the KP q- composite scheme was proposed to tackle this node-capture problem. Recently, Bechkit et al. proposed a hash chain based KP (HCKP) q-composite scheme to further enhance network resiliency against node capture. However, Bechkit et al.'s HCKP q-composite scheme has to perform too many hash operations to establish a secure link between two nodes for the case that the difference of node identifiers is large. This computational overhead is more serious for the large value of q. In this paper, we propose a computational overhead invariant HCKP q-composite scheme by storing one additional hashed value in sensor node. When compared with Bechkit et al.'s HCKP q-composite scheme, the proposed scheme reduces the number of hash operations, and meanwhile the storage overhead remains insignificant.