Towards Dynamic Hash-Based Key Establishment in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networking Nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become an increasingly popular technology over the past decade with multiple applications in a range of avenues from E-healthcare to environmental monitoring. WSN applications can be used for data collection, monitoring, and operational analytics to aid in decision making. Recently WSN technology has also found increasing adoption in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. WSNs are usually deployed in unattended environments and hence, securing the exchange of data among individual WSN entities is a serious concern. Multiple algorithms have been previously suggested including the novel Hash-Based Key Agreement (HKBA) algorithm to establish cryptographic keys between static entities. The present work extends the static HBKA further, using asymmetric cryptography to dynamically establish symmetric pairwise keys between mobile WSN nodes. During validation several crucial concerns including security, time latency, power and storage requirements of the evolved algorithm are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. Finally, the paper also considers the feasibility of applying the proposed algorithm in mobile WSN environments and discusses possible application domains. *CRITICAL: Do Not Use Symbols, Special Characters, Footnotes, or Math in Paper Title or Abstract.