Providing perfect forward secrecy for location-aware wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Abstract Sensor nodes are resource-constrained, such as low battery life, computation, bandwidth and memory, so traditional public key schemes are impractical in wireless sensor networks. In the previous schemes, symmetric cryptography is the most common method used in sensor nodes. How to distribute keys into every sensor node is an important issue in many applications for hierarchical sensor networks. Once adversaries compromise a sensor node, they can obtain all information from the sensor’s memory, such as keying material. The revocation of compromised sensor nodes is also a necessary but troublesome operation. These compromised sensor nodes may lead to the compromise of the entire network. In this article, we present an efficient approach to establish security links between each sensor node/cluster head and its neighbor/member. Our scheme only requires small memory size for each cluster head and sensor node, and it can also ensure perfect forward secrecy via changing session key in every transmission.