Providing End-to-End Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

In many Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), providing end to end secure communications between sensors and the sink is important for secure network management. While there have been many works devoted to hop by hop secure communications, the issue of end to end secure communications is largely ignored. In this paper, the authors design an end to end secure communication protocol in randomly deployed WSNs. Specifically, their protocol is based on a methodology called differentiated key pre-distribution. The core idea is to distribute different number of keys to different sensors to enhance the resilience of certain links. This feature is leveraged during routing, where nodes route through those links with higher resilience.