Efficient key Management System using Channel Response in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

There are challenges abound for key management in wireless sensor networks. The importance of key management gets highlighted when the network gets scaled up without the availability of enough resources and new kind of threats in the form of node capture emerge. The economic viability of such schemes are usually high as the increase in security is directly proportional to the computational complexity, thus attributing to the high cost. In the wireless sensor infrastructure, nodes get connected with each other in wireless medium and can enter and exit the network at their will. Such aspect of entering and exiting paves the way for malicious nodes too to enter in to the network, making the entire network vulnerable to several types of attacks. One of the prominent attack is network jamming where the transmission lines gets jammed blocking the free flow of data as well as corrupting it. Such attacks on node and data transmissions can be avoided by increasing the security afforded to the entire WSN. In this regard, a novel key generation algorithm has been proposed in this paper using channel response technique, where the data hops from one channel to another in its transit from the source node to the destination node securing it from attacks. The Leap and Stop algorithm has been applied for channel hopping thus ensuring that the data traverses only for a small duration in each channel before hopping to the other channel. The channel hopping technique minimizes the probability of attack since before an active channel could be successfully predicted by the attacker, it becomes inactive and another channel gets activated. This channel hopping process continues till data reaches the destination safely without getting corrupted. The proposed approach had been compared for its efficiency and performance with Secure Key Generation using Frequency Selective Channels (SKGFSC) protocol and the results had been shown therewith.