An Energy-Efficient Dynamic Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of small sensor nodes with constrained energy, memory and computation capabilities. They are often deployed in the unattended and hostile environment. Therefore sensor nodes are vulnerable to attacks such as node capture and collusion attack by adversaries. To protect the whole network, cryptographic techniques are necessary that pairwise key establishment is the essential procedure. It enables that sensor nodes can communicate to each other securely. However, it is impractical to use traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography and key distribution center (KDC) because of the resource constraints of sensor nodes. This paper proposes a key distribution scheme, based on exclusion-based systems (EBSs) and t-degree bivariate polynomials. It is an energy-efficient dynamic key management scheme which performs localized rekeying to minimize overhead.