A Novel Design of Membership Authentication and Group Key Establishment Protocol

A new type of authentication, called group authentication, has been proposed recently which can authenticate all users belonging to the same group at once in a group communication. However, the group authentication can only detect the existence of nonmembers but cannot identify who are the nonmembers. Furthermore, in a group communication, it needs not only to authenticate memberships but also to establish a group key among all members. In this paper, we propose a novel design to provide both membership authentication and group key establishment. Our proposed membership authentication can not only detect nonmembers but also identify who are the nonmembers. We first propose a basic membership authentication and key establishment protocol which can only support one-time group communication. Then, we extend the basic protocol to support multiple group communications. Our design is unique since tokens of users issued by a group manager (GM) during registration are used for both membership authentication and group key establishment

LEE: Light‐Weight Energy‐Efficient encryption algorithm for sensor networks

Data confidentiality in wireless sensor networks is mainly achieved by RC5 and Skipjack encryption algorithms. However, both algorithms have their weaknesses, for example RC5 supports variable-bit rotations, which are computationally expensive operations and Skipjack uses a key length of 80-bits, which is subject to brute force attack. In this paper we introduce a light-weight energy- fficient encryption-algorithm (LEE) for tiny embedded devices, such as sensor network nodes. We present experimental results of LEE under real sensor nodes operating in TinyOS. We also discuss the secrecy of our algorithm by presenting a security analysis of various tests and cryptanalytic attacks

Using combined keying materials for key distribution in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic key predistribution scheme for wireless sensor networks that increases connectivity of the basic scheme while keeping sizes of keyring and key pool fixed. We introduce the concept of XORed key, which is the bitwise XOR of two regular (a.k.a. single) keys. Sensor nodes are preloaded with a mixture of single and XORed keys. Nodes establish secure links by using shared XORed keys whenever possible. If node pairs do not have any shared XORed or single keys, they transfer keys from their secure neighbors in a couple of ways, and use them to match with their XORed keys. In this way, the probability of securing links, i.e. local connectivity, increases. The decision of which key is to be transferred from which node is given based on local information at the hand of the nodes. We aim to control the resilience of the network against node capture attacks by using XORed keys since an attacker has to know either both single key operands or the XORed key itself. Simulations show that our scheme is up to 50% more connected as compared to basic scheme. Also it has better resilience performance at the beginning of a node capture attack. When it starts to deteriorate, the difference between the resilience of our proposed scheme and basic scheme is not greater than 5%