A Dynamic Key Management Scheme Based on Secret Sharing for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Since wireless sensor networks (WSN for short) are often deployed in hostile environments in many applications, security becomes one of the critical issues in WSN. Moreover, due to the limitation of the sensor nodes, traditional key management schemes are not suitable for it. Thereby,a feasible and efficient key management scheme is an important guarantee for WSN to communicate securely. For the moment, many protocols have been proposed and each has its own advantages. However, these protocols cannot provide sufficient security in many cases, such as node capture attack, which makes WSN more vulnerable than traditional wireless networks. Key protection and revocation issues must be considered with special attention in WSN. To address these two issues, we propose a dynamically clustering key management scheme based on secret sharing for WSN. The scheme combined the hierarchical structure of wireless sensor networks with dynamic key management scheme. The analysis results show that the scheme has strong security and resistance of captured attack, as well as low communicational overhead, and it well meets the requirement of scalability. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/telkomnika.v11i3.2300