Please cite this article in press as: M.A. Hamid, et al., A key distribution scheme for secure communication in acoustic sensor networks, Future Generation Computer Systems (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.07.025. Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) – Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Future Generation Computer Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs A key distribution scheme for secure communication in acoustic sensor networks Md. Abdul Hamid a , M. Abdullah-Al-Wadud b , Mohammad Mehedi Hassan b, *, Ahmad Almogren b , Atif Alamri b , Abu Raihan M. Kamal c , Md. Mamun-Or-Rashid d a Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science & Information Technology, American International University-Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh b Research Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia c Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Islamic University of Technology, Gazipur, Bangladesh d Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh highlights • A new deterministic key distribution mechanism for acoustic sensor networks. • The construction methodology uses the properties of regular Hexagon. • The configurations have a compact and efficient algebraic description. article info Article history: Received 20 January 2017 Received in revised form 20 June 2017 Accepted 10 July 2017 Available online xxxx Keywords: Acoustic sensor networks (ASNs) Key distribution Hexagon Communication security Wireless network abstract Cryptographic key distribution is always a major problem in large scale wireless communications such as Acoustic Sensor Networks (ASNs) based on wireless sensors in an Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Because of the resource constraints of the nodes in such networks, the traditional cryptographic primitives are not suitable solutions. Our endeavor in this paper is to develop a new deterministic key distribution mechanism for such networks. In particular, we bring in a novel construction methodology from two- dimensional geometry by exploiting the properties of regular Hexagon. One advantage of using the proposed approach, as opposed to randomized distribution techniques, is that, the configurations have a compact and efficient algebraic description. This yields nice algorithm for shared-key discovery, in which very little information (or no information at all) needs to be broadcasted. Furthermore, it is shown that the security strength of the proposed approach outperforms well-known deterministic techniques in terms of resilience. Furthermore, the distribution technique ensures 100% connectivity (i.e., the probability that two nodes share a key is 1) and average key-path length is 1. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Acoustic sensor networks (ASNs) are usually deployed to mon- itor vast environment underwater and underground with the help of a large number of sensors. With the penetration of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, the scope ASN is growing so fast to be integrated in different smart monitoring systems such as moni- toring and surveillance, underwater and underground exploration, disaster prevention and recovery, and many other applications. The scope is growing to collect data from many different systems * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: hamid@aiub.edu (M.A. Hamid), mwadud@ksu.edu.sa (M. Abdullah-Al-Wadud), mmhassan@ksu.edu.sa (M.M. Hassan), ahalmogren@ksu.edu.sa (A. Almogren), atif@ksu.edu.sa (A. Alamri), raihan.kamal@iut-dhaka.edu (A.R.M. Kamal), mamun@cse.univdhaka.edu (M. Mamun-Or-Rashid). built on wireless sensor networks composed of low power and resource constraint sensors as a huge source of data. Such sensor networks are mainly responsible for collecting different data about devices and environment under consideration, and sending the data to sinks in a single or multi-hop fashion, necessitating a large number of nodes to communicate with each other to send the collected data to sink. Securing such communication is hence very important in order to maintain privacy and other security issues associated with data collection services [1–5]. However, due to the resource constraints of sensor networks, traditional cryptographic primitives are not suitable solutions. More specif- ically cryptographic key distribution is always a major problem in such an environment. Basically, a key distribution scheme has 3 phases: (i) key distribution, (ii) shared key discovery and (iii) path-key establishment. During these phases, secret keys are gen- erated and placed in nodes, and each node searches the area in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.07.025 0167-739X/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.