An ECC-Time Stamp Based Mutual Authentication and Key Management Scheme for WSNs

Abstract

Although the security in WSNs is currently being provided through mostly Symmetric Key Cryptography but still Public Key Cryptography plays a vital role in providing security in secure communication in a Wireless Sensor Network. Due to the memory constraints in wireless sensor nodes, the proposed protocols in the literature are based on the idea of pre-distribution of keys before the deployment of the WSNs but are not able to achieve perfect secrecy and also face the key management problem in large scale WSNs. Whereas Asymmetric Key Cryptography offers a flexible but clean interface for the security component in the WSNs. This paper proposes a new mutual authentication and key management scheme for a particular session between any two corresponding nodes of a WSN based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography with a novel time stamp mechanism.