PUF-Based Mutual-Authenticated Key Distribution for Dynamic Sensor Networks

Because of the movements of sensor nodes and unknown mobility pattern, how to ensure two communicating (static or mobile) nodes authenticate and share a pairwise key is important. In this paper, we propose a mutual-authenticated key distribution scheme based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs) for dynamic sensor networks. Compared with traditional key predistribution schemes, the proposal reduces the storage overhead and the key exposure risks and thereby improves the resilience against node capture attacks. Mutual authentication is provided by the PUF challenge-response mechanism. However, the PUF response is not transmitted in plain forms so as to resist the modelling attacks, which is vulnerable in some existing PUF-based schemes. We demonstrate the proposed scheme to improve the secure connectivity and other performances by analysis and experiments.