A Reliable and Secure Hybrid Key Management Scheme for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have shown a tremendous growth by evolving from merely a concept to a multifaceted realm of real world applications. This increase in growth and popularity is due to the fact that WSNs provide potentially low cost and cutting edge solutions to a range of critical problems like in healthcare, disaster management. Nevertheless, WSNs have some intrinsic security threats due to the wireless communication, unattended nature of deployment and sometimes harsh environment. Therefore, securing the WSN communication is a major concern. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) holds the capacity to provide much needed security to WSN; however, it is considered to be an expensive option for a resource constrained network. Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC) is thought to be lightweight and therefore can be considered ideal for resource starved WSN, nevertheless, it has downsides too. In this paper, we exploit the strengths of both PKC and SKC and present a distinctive secure and reliable key management scheme for the backbone assisted WSNs. We make use of PKC for the node authentication and communication between the resource rich nodes i.e. gateway nodes. SKC is primarily used by the resource constrained sensor nodes. We prove that our scheme facilitates in discovering and minimizing the effect of various attacks like selective forwarding attack, sinkhole attack, and wormhole attack. We evaluate performance of our proposed scheme and compare it with the existing approaches. We prove that our scheme performs much better and incurs very less memory, computation and communication overhead as compared to the existing key management schemes.