Energy Efficient and Dynamic Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACT In Wireless Sensor Networks, efficient key management plays a vital role in secure communications. Unlike their wired counterparts, WSNs are vulnerable to attacks due to open network architecture, highly dynamic network topology besides their resource constrained nature. As WSN became ubiquitous, it is inevitable to have efficient key management scheme. Moreover, in hostile environments the nodes in WSN are vulnerable to security risks due to dead nodes problem and probability of node capture. Security mechanisms used in traditional networks are not suitable for WSN. Energy efficient dynamic key management scheme is essential for ensuring fool proof security in WSN. There are many existing key distribution schemes for WSN in the literature. However, most of them are static in nature. In this paper we explore a dynamic key management scheme for WSN. We used cluster-based sensor network for implementing key management scheme. Public Key Cryptography is used for the proposed key management scheme which is based on broadcast authentication. The proposed scheme can efficiently handle attacks launched by adversaries besides ensuring that dead nodes cannot cause security leaks. Since energy is a valuable resource for WSN, our scheme is made energy efficient. The proposed scheme can also handle compromised cluster head efficiently. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme is energy efficient and supports dynamic key management in dynamic network environment for high level of security.