Key Management for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks: A Robust Scheme

Anubrata Chanda,Pampa Sadhukhan,Nandini Mukherjee

doi:10.4108/eai.2-10-2020.166541

Anubrata Chanda, Pampa Sadhukhan + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.2-10-2020.166541

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Abstract

Secure data transmission within the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a critical issue as they are mostly deployed in the open areas. Moreover, the communication between the cluster head (CH) and the base station(BS) in a hierarchical WSN is required to be more secure since the CH is responsible for data collection, aggregation and its forwarding to the BS. Thus, this paper aims to design a hybrid key management scheme (KMS) for the hierarchical WSNs for enhancing security between the CH and BS by using some asymmetric cryptographic technique while applying the secret key based communication among the member nodes to reduce their computational overheads. The security analysis of our proposed scheme exhibits its robustness against the node capture attack and its ability to support the node revocation. The performances of proposed scheme are also evaluated in term of data freshness, average number of keys established, throughput and computational cost to demonstrate its efficiency.

Highlights

Low-cost and small sensor nodes which are equipped with radio transceiver and low-power batteries can be effectively used in collecting various kinds of data like temperature, pressure, motion etc
Since the nodes within the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) communicate through the wireless channel and mostly deployed in the open areas, an adversary can eavesdrop on the messages exchanged between the nodes or can alter the data carried by these messages and even the adversary can compromise some node
Such key management scheme (KMS) cannot be effectively applied to the hierarchical or cluster-based WSNs which are partitioned into several subsets in order to carry out in-network

Summary

Introduction

Low-cost and small sensor nodes which are equipped with radio transceiver and low-power batteries can be effectively used in collecting various kinds of data like temperature, pressure, motion etc. The communication among two or more parties, in general, can be made secured by applying some cryptographic protocol that uses either some symmetric key (single secret key) or asymmetric keys (pair of public and private key) [2] Managing such cryptographic keys by the resource-constrained sensor nodes is a major issue to securing communication among the nodes within a WSN. Symmetric key based various key management schemes (KMS ) for distributed WSNs [4,5,6,7,8] have been proposed in the literature in the last decade Such KMSs cannot be effectively applied to the hierarchical or cluster-based WSNs which are partitioned into several subsets (clusters) in order to carry out in-network

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