Key De-Synchronization Attack against Yüksel-Nielson's Key Distribution Protocol for ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks

Security plays an important role in several ZigBee applications such as Smart Energy and medical sensor applications. For a secure communication among ZigBee devices, a secret key should be shared among any two ZigBee devices using the Key Distribution protocol. Recently, Yüksel and Nielson proposed a new Key Distribution protocol for ZigBee addressing the security weaknesses of the original ZigBee Key Distribution protocol. In this letter, it is shown that their protocol is not secure against a key de-synchronization attack, and a security-enhanced Key Distribution protocol is newly proposed and analyzed in terms of security.