A Secure Key Establishment Protocol for ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks

ZigBee is a wireless sensor network standard that defines network and application layers on top of IEEE 802.15.4's physical and medium access control layers. In the latest version of ZigBee, enhancements are prescribed for the security sublayer but we show in this paper that problems persist. In particular, we show that the end-to-end application key establishment protocol is flawed and we propose a secure protocol instead. We do so by using formal verification techniques based on static program analysis and process algebras. We present a way of using formal methods in wireless network security, and propose a secure key establishment protocol for ZigBee networks.