Abstract
Securing data transferred over a WSN is required to protect data from being compromised by attackers. Sensors in the WSN must share keys that are utilized to protect data transmitted between sensor nodes. There are several approaches introduced in the literature for key establishment in WSNs. Designing a key distribution/establishment scheme in WSNs is a challenging task due to the limited resources of sensor nodes. Polynomial-based key distribution schemes have been proposed in WSNs to provide a lightweight solution for resource-constraint devices. More importantly, polynomial-based schemes guarantee that a pairwise key exists between two sensors in the WSNs. However, one problem associated with all polynomial-based approaches in WSNs is that they are vulnerable to sensor capture attacks. Specifically, the attacker can compromise the security of the entire network by capturing a fixed number of sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel polynomial-based scheme with a probabilistic security feature that effectively reduces the security risk of sensor-captured attacks and requires minimal memory and computation overhead. Furthermore, our design can be extended to provide hierarchical key management to support data aggregation in WSNs.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed in various settings that aim at data acquisition
In hierarchical WSNs, devices are organized into a hierarchy based on their capabilities: sensor nodes with their limited capabilities are located in the bottom of the hierarchy; cluster heads (CHs) are located in the middle of the hierarchy and have more capabilities than those of sensor nodes; and a mobile sink has the largest capabilities and is located at the top of the hierarchy
The tokens’ sizes decrease when they move from the top of the hierarchy, which has the more capable devices to the bottom of the hierarchy, which consists of limitedresource devices
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed in various settings that aim at data acquisition. Each sensor needs to share a pairwise key with every other sensor in the network This approach can resist node capture attack, but the storage requirement is linearly proportional to the network size. In most key distribution schemes in WSNs, there are some objectives that need to be satisfied, such as low memory requirements, low computational and communication overhead, and high connectivity and robustness against node capture attacks. A hierarchical key management model is used to enable us to generate tokens according to network traffic flow With such a feature, the tokens’ sizes (i.e., polynomial’s coefficients) decrease when they move from the top of the hierarchy, which has the more capable devices (i.e., base station, cluster heads) to the bottom of the hierarchy, which consists of limitedresource devices (i.e., sensors).
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