An Elliptic Curve based Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a growing expertise which has been used in many areas such as airports, smart watches, smart cities, smart health organizations, and smart homes. It has provided mankind with a lot of benefits in different areas and domains. They are also used in disaster management, habitat monitoring in forests, and many applications in hostile areas such as military; therefore, there is a need to enforce security policy. Also, in many instances of data transfer in WSNs, there is a need of stricter authentication process. Presently, authentication in WSNs is commonly achieved through the use of usernames and passwords. A wicked attacker can impersonate to the network as a genuine user by using stolen password(s). This is chiefly due to the lack of proper key management scheme(s) currently available for WSNs. Moreover, because of limited memory and computing power, it is problematic to decide the proper key management system for WSNs. We propose a key management scheme (KMS) for WSNs using an elliptic curve in this paper. The proposed KMS is implemented in Java SE 6(Mustang) and evaluated for critical performance by using an elliptic curve in a WSN of varied cluster head (CH) sizes.