An attack model based highly secure key management scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) security is a critical issue due to its inherent characteristic and unattended operation which makes it vulnerable to many attacks. Key management plays a fundamental role for providing security services to such networks. In this paper, we aim to reduce the node capture impact by incorporating an efficient adversarial model for cellular model of WSN. The adversarial model exploits several vulnerabilities present in the network such as high node density, placement of the sink node, neighbour influence factor to compute the compromise probability of each cell. It then defines the hash chain length for each cell with different rekey interval to increase the network resistance against node capture attack. The proposed scheme is compared with other existing schemes in terms of the probability of key compromise and the number of links rekeyed. The results confirm its effectiveness in increasing the WSN security.