2020/01/01 by Chris J. Mitchell, Mitchell, Chris J
Computer Science · #Advanced Authentication Protocols Security #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Security in Wireless Sensor Networks
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.05597
openalex publication_date 2020/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Three closely-related polynomial-based group key pre-distribution schemes\nhave recently been proposed, aimed specifically at wireless sensor networks.\nThe schemes enable any subset of a predefined set of sensor nodes to establish\na shared secret key without any communications overhead. It is claimed that\nthese schemes are both secure and lightweight, i.e. making them particularly\nappropriate for network scenarios where nodes have limited computational and\nstorage capabilities. Further papers have built on these schemes, e.g. to\npropose secure routing protocols for wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately,\nas we show in this paper, all three schemes are completely insecure; whilst the\ndetails of their operation varies, they share common weaknesses. In every case\nwe show that an attacker equipped with the information built into at most two\nsensor nodes can compute group keys for all possible groups of which the\nattacked nodes are not a member, which breaks a fundamental design objective.\nThe attacks can also be achieved by an attacker armed with the information from\na single node together with a single group key to which this sensor node is not\nentitled. Repairing the schemes appears difficult, if not impossible. The\nexistence of major flaws is not surprising given the complete absence of any\nrigorous proofs of security for the proposed schemes. A further recent paper\nproposes a group membership authentication and key establishment scheme based\non one of the three key pre-distribution schemes analysed here; as we\ndemonstrate, this scheme is also insecure, as the attack we describe on the\ncorresponding pre-distribution scheme enables the authentication process to be\ncompromised.\n