A review on the PKC-based security architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is formed of low powered, battery driven electromechanical devices called sensor nodes which communicate with each other through the wireless medium. Secure data communication is a major concern for many sensor network applications. To ensure the confidentiality, it is necessary to establish a secure communication link among sensor nodes by means of cryptographic keys. However, due to the sensor network deployment scenario and several other constraints it is not an easy task to establish a security mechanism for WSN. Recently Haque et. al. proposed a PKC based security architecture to achieve secure data communication in WSN. In this paper, we point out some weaknesses in the PKC based scheme and propose an enhanced scheme to withstand these weaknesses. It is shown that the PKC based security scheme is susceptible to selective node capture attack. Moreover, this scheme requires contacting with the base station for each and every single communication which will add extra communication overhead. In our enhanced scheme, a sensor node establishes unique link key with its neighboring nodes once they are deployed which in turn increases the resiliency against nodes capture attack. Compared to the original scheme our modified scheme reduces the complexity and communication cost of the system while achieving a sufficient level of security.