A Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks Using Keyed-Hash Chain

Abstract

We present a suite of key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks. In view of different types of communications, a single key can not satisfy various communication requirements. It is necessary to study the establishment and renewal of different types of keys in heterogeneous sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a new key management scheme which can support five types of communications. Our basic scheme is based on a keyed-hash chain approach. A new cluster mechanism is used to improve the probability of key sharing between sensors and their cluster heads. Different from existing schemes where a node capture attack might lead to the disclosure of several key chains, our method can avoid this drawback through not storing network-wide generating keys in low-cost sensors. Only pairwise keys involving the compromised node should be deleted in our scheme. It is motivated by the observation that all the information stored on a sensor may be disclosed once the sensor gets compromised. Through the analysis of both security and performance, we show the scheme meets the security requirements.