EDAK: An Efficient Dynamic Authentication and Key Management Mechanism for heterogeneous WSNs

Abstract

Securing the network communication represents one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks. The key distribution problem has been widely discussed in classical wireless sensor networks contrarily to heterogeneous ones. HWSNs (Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks) have optimized the network capability and opened new security opportunities by introducing high resource capacity sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, an efficient dynamic authentication and key Management scheme is proposed for heterogeneous WSN. The main idea is to provide a single lightweight protocol for both authentication and key establishment while optimizing the security level. The key distribution algorithm is based on preexisting information to generate dynamic keys and does not require any secure channel and sharing phase which improves the security, energy efficiency and reduces the memory consumption. Experimental results have confirmed the performances of our mechanism compared to some of the existing security protocols.