A cost‐effective attack matrix based key management scheme with dominance key set for wireless sensor network security

Abstract

SummaryTo guarantee the proper functionality of wireless sensor network even in the presence of the potential threats, a well‐designed key management scheme is very important. The assumptions about attackers critically influence the performance of security mechanisms. This paper investigates the problem of node capture from adversarial view point in which the adversary intelligently exploits the different vulnerabilities of the network to establish a cost‐effective attack matrix. To counteract such attacks, the defender or the network designer constructs similar attack matrix. The defender will identify a set of critical nodes and use the key compromise relationship to assign a key dominance rank to each node of the network. The key dominance rank quantifies the possibility of attack on a particular node. It is used to determine the hash chain length. It is also used to improve the security of path key establishment as well as rekeying of the proposed scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed with other existing schemes, and it is shown that it outperforms with increased resilience against node capture, reduced number of hash computations, reduced key compromise probability of proxy nodes, and reduced number of revoked links during rekeying process.