Improving Key Negotiation in Transitory Master Key Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have been adopted in various areas of daily life, and this exposes the network data and hardware to a number of security threats. Many key management schemes have been proposed to secure the communications among nodes, for instance the popular LEAP+ protocol. This paper proposes an enhanced variant of the LEAP+ protocol that decreases the key setup time through the reduction of the number of packets exchanged. This improves the security of communications. The results obtained by network simulation after extensive testing are compared to the corresponding data derived from the LEAP+ protocol to quantify the improvements.