An Efficient and Secure Key Management Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

 Abstract—Key management in wireless sensor network is a complex task due to its nature of environment. Wireless sensor network comprise of large number of sensor nodes with different hardware abilities and functions. Due to the limited memory resources and energy constraints, complex security algorithms cannot be used in sensor networks. Therefore, an energy efficient key management scheme is necessary to mitigate the security risks. In this paper, we present an Efficient and Secure Key Management Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Network (ESKMS). The proposed technique distributes the keys within a cluster efficiently and updates the pre-deployed keys to mitigate the node compromise attack. We also provide a detailed security analysis of our ESKMS protocol and show its advantages in avoiding different type of attacks from malicious nodes. Finally, using NS-2 simulator, the results shows that ESKMS is more energy efficient and provides a longer network lifetime compared to the existing key management schemes.