The Optimum Design of Location-Dependent Key Management Protocol for a WSN With a Random Selected Cell Reporter

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks for smart city applications can be widely deployed, but they can also be vulnerable to be compromised by outsider attackers. It is, therefore, critical that the disseminated information is secured in terms of its confidentiality, availability, and authenticity. Many key management schemes have been proposed to guarantee the aforementioned requirements and the most popular depend on the location of the sensor to generate the required credentials. This paper presents a new location-dependent key management protocol (LKMP), called the LKMP with random selected cell reporters (LKMP-RSCR). In this protocol, the generated report of an event must contain a third level of endorsement handled by a set of cell reporters to be accepted by the sink. As a result, the adversary needs to compromise all endorsement nodes in addition to the entire set of cell reporters to generate a fraudulent report from a specific region. A mathematical analysis is presented to evaluate the LKMP-RSCR, and in contrast to existing location-dependent end-to-end data security and MKMP schemes, our new scheme shows a significant improvement in terms of data confidentiality, authenticity, computation, and communication cost. Revocation algorithms for compromised nodes and cells are also presented to overcome the possible consequences of node compromising.