Constant storage self-healing key distribution with revocation in wireless sensor network

A self-healing key distribution scheme enables a large group of users (sensor nodes) to establish a session key dynamically over an unreliable, or lossy wireless network. The main property of self-healing ensures that the qualified users can recover the lost session keys on their own from the broadcast packets and some private information, without any additional communication with the group manager, thus decreasing the load on the group manager. The only requirement for a user to recover the lost session keys, is its membership in the group both before and after the sessions in which the broadcast packets containing the keys are sent. Self-healing approach of key distribution is stateless in the sense that a user who has been off-line for some period is able to recover the lost session keys immediately after coming back on-line. This paper presents a new self-healing key distribution scheme with revocation capability that requires constant storage of personal keys for each user and we feel, it is more efficient than the previous schemes in terms of communication complexity. The novelty of this scheme is to use a different and more efficient self-healing mechanism compared to the ones in the literature. The scheme is supported by a proper security analysis in an appropriate security model. It is unconditionally secure and achieves both forward and backward secrecy. Moreover, unlike previous works, proposed self-healing key distribution is not restricted to m sessions in Setup phase.