Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) security faces more challenges than traditional Ad hoc networks due to its highly self-organization and limited energy. Key management is one of the fundamental security issues in WSN. As a vital part of key management, session key establishment needs to achieve a trade-off between security and performance. In this paper, a survey on Identity-based key establishment in WSN was provided. We firstly described the identedity-based cryptography from its three fundamental primitives, then presented some security properties and security models of identity-based key agreement protocols, analyzed the existing identity-based key establishment protocols for WSN to point out their shortages, and finally discusses the research area of Identity-based key establishment for WSN in the future.

Key words: Identity-based cryptography, Wireless sensor networks, Key establishment, Key agreement