PIKE: Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks Haowen Chan Adrian Perrig Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15221, USA Pittsburgh, PA 15221, USA Email:
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[email protected] Abstract— The establishment of shared cryptographic keys where the communication load is focused around the base between communicating neighbor nodes in sensor networks is a station. As the nodes closest to the base station are obliged to challenging problem due to the unsuitability of asymmetric key forward most of the communications between the base station cryptography for these resource-constrained platforms. A range of symmetric-key distribution protocols exist, but these protocols and the rest of the sensor network, they expend battery energy do not scale effectively to large sensor networks. For a given level at a higher rate, thus often shortening the lifetime of the of security, each protocol incurs a linearly increasing overhead network. This focused communication load is proportional to in either communication cost per node or memory per node. We the total number of nodes in the network. Furthermore, the describe Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment (PIKE), a base station can become a rich target for compromise, since it class of key-establishment protocols that involves using one or more sensor nodes as a trusted intermediary to facilitate key represents a single point of failure which can break the security establishment. We show that, unlike existing key-establishment of the entire network. The highly focused communication protocols, both the communication and memory overheads of pattern also allows an adversary to easily perform traffic PIKE protocols scale sub-linearly (O(pn)) with the number of analysis to locate the base station for compromise.