A Survey on Path Key Establishment

Key management is a mechanism to generate, distribute, and manage the cryptographic keys, among the sensor nodes. During the distribution of keys, sometimes the nodes are not able to share the keys. In this case, the nodes use path establishment schemes to secure the transfer of the keys from a source to destination pair. Security of encryption used as path key further depends on the security of underlying keys of intermediate nodes. Sometimes, during a shared key discovery, nodes are not able to establish the symmetric key. How to establish a path between communicating nodes is still an issue that needs to be addressed seriously. Several issues have to be taken care of while designing a path key establishment scheme, namely overhead due to communication, resilience against node capture, storage, and computation. If we increase the security, other overhead may also increase; thus how we can balance these factors is very important. We aim to provide a comprehensive survey of different schemes. We have evaluated these schemes based on their merits and demerits.