A partial key distribution protocol for WSNs in distributed IoT applications

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), deployed in distributed Internet of Things (IoT) applications, measure data, process, exchange information, and function collaboratively with other sensor nodes and end-users, which can be internal or external to the network. To maintain the reliable connectivity and the accessibility of distributed IoT, it is vital to establish secure links for end-to-end communication with a strong pervasive communication mechanism. However, due to the resource constraints and heterogeneous characteristics of the sensor devices, traditional authentication and key management schemes are not effective for such applications. Here we propose a pervasive lightweight authentication and keying mechanism for WSNs in distributed IoT applications in which the sensor nodes can establish secure links with peer sensor nodes and end-users. The established authentication scheme is based on implicit certificates and it provides application level end-to-end security. A comprehensive description of the scenario based behaviour of the protocol is presented. With the performance evaluation and the security analysis, it is justified that the proposed scheme is viable to deploy in the resource constrained WSNs.