Revisiting public-key cryptography for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) promise to revolutionize the ability to sense and control diverse physical environments using many small, inexpensive devices that integrate sensing, computation, and communication. These sensors can collaborate with each other and perform complex information-gathering and dissemination tasks such as infrastructure security, environment and habitat monitoring, industrial sensing, and traffic control. Security of these sensors is ensured with an efficient key distribution mechanism. Such a mechanism exploits the abundant resources of sink-based nodes to relieve resource-constrained entities as much as possible.