Key-insulated encryption based group key management for wireless sensor network

Abstract

The key exposure problem is a practical threat for many security applications. In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), keys could be compromised easily due to its limited hardware protections. A secure group key management scheme is responsible for secure distributing group keys among valid nodes of the group. Based on the key-insulated encryption (KIE), we propose a group key management scheme (KIE-GKMS), which integrates the pair-wise key pre-distribution for WSN. The KIE-GKMS scheme updates group keys dynamically when adding or removing nodes. Moreover, the security analysis proves that the KIE-GKMS scheme not only obtains the semantic security, but also provides the forward and backward security. Finally, the theoretical analysis shows that the KIE-GKMS scheme has constant performance on both communication and storage costs in sensor nodes.