Public-key Cryptography: Theory and Practice

B.3. The Basic Bootstrapping Framework

Key establishment in a sensor network is effected by a three-stage process called bootstrapping. Subsequent node-to-node communication uses the keys established during the bootstrapping phase. The three stages of bootstrapping are as follows:

Key predistribution

This step is carried out before the deployment of the sensors. A key set-up server chooses a pool of randomly generated keys and assigns to each sensor node u_i a subset of . The set is called the key ring of the node u_i. The key predistribution ...