A robust pair-wise and group key management protocol for wireless sensor network

Abstract

The design of efficient key management protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a challenging task. To be robust and adaptable to many WSN applications, the key management protocol should not only be lightweight but also should support both pair-wise and group-wise communications. Many previous works have focused on developing efficient pair-wise key management protocols in WSNs. Very few works, however, have addressed pair-wise and group-wise key management together using a common pre-distributed secret key. Moreover, key revocation, key material refresh, and new node addition issues have received little attention. In this paper, we propose a new key management protocol for WSNs that provides support for both pair-wise and group-wise key management with the same pre-distributed secret. The proposed protocol is efficient in terms of communication and storage overhead.