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Reputation Model based Dynamic Pair-wise Key Establishment Scheme for Sensor Networks
Lei Wang and Ruizhong Wei

Secure pair-wise key management, which enables sensors to communicate each other securely, plays a fundamental role in research on security issues in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a new reputation model of sensors is described, and then by combing the new reputation model with a very simple key pre-distribution scheme, novel dynamic pair-wise key establishment and maintenance algorithms are proposed. In the scheme, each node is pre-assigned a same initial global key before deployment. After deployment, the nodes will establish different 1-hop local pair-wise key with its different neighbors dynamically. Theoretic analysis and simulation results show that the new algorithm has much higher probability of direct and indirect pair-wise key establishment than previous traditional pair-wise key establishing methods. Furthermore, it is distributed and has excellent security performance and low key establishing costs simultaneously.

Keywords: Pair-wise key, sensor networks, reputation, network security.

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