A Secure Hierarchical Key Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Due to the vulnerable environment, limited recourse and open communication channel, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are necessary to be protected from various attacks. The key management is an important way to protect the communication in WSNs. In this paper, we present a hierarchical key management scheme (HKMS) which can efficiently enhance the security and survivability for the clustered WSNs. Different from previous works, the HKMS distributes keys based on hop counts and one-way function by the clustered architecture, which not only localizes the key things but also has no overhead. The HKMS provides the session keys among sensors and the cluster key between the cluster head and member nodes. The HKMS dynamically generates different keys based on different hops in different periods which can protect the network from the compromised nodes and reduce the high probability of the common keys without any special sensors (such as the anchor nodes). The security analysis and simulation show the HKMS can prevent several attacks effectively and reduce the energy consumption.

A New Hierarchical Key Management Scheme for Secure Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Distributed scheme Centralized scheme HKMS [9] LEAP [10] LEAP+ [11] SHELL [13] LKHW [8] HIKES [12,14] Among the first proposed centralized hierarchical key management schemes in the literature, we find LKHW [8]. This scheme is based on a logical key hierarchy.…”

“…In [9], authors presented a distributed hierarchical key management named HKMS for clustered WSNs. HKMS [9] is designed for homogenous WSNs, it does not employ special sensor nodes (e.g.…”

“…HKMS [9] is designed for homogenous WSNs, it does not employ special sensor nodes (e.g. sensor nodes with high energy or high computational capability) to distribute or to establish keys.…”

“…The existing hierarchical key management schemes [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] suppose that the WSN is previously organized into clusters by applying one of the existing clustering algorithms. So, the proposed key management solutions relay on hierarchical WSNs and do not take into account the security of cluster formation where an attacker can easily disturb this phase.…”

Efficient Group Key Management using Symmetric Key and Threshold Cryptography for Cluster based Wireless Sensor Networks

“…2), reducing the communication cost, the storage overhead and also improving the resilience against the node capture attack become a must. Recently several enhanced secure cluster based routing protocols have been proposed in literature [ 20,26,31,33,34 ] to achieve both security and efficiency for WSNs. Figure 1 shows the basic security requirements of WSNs.…”