Designing an Improved KISS Environment

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of a number of wireless nodes connected to each other using wireless connections. Because these nodes are wirelessly connected with each other and base stations, they are highly prone to the hacking attacks. When the WSN nodes are in working condition, they need secure cryptographic keys for secure propagation of the sensitive information. Existing cryptographic key management and distribution technique usually consume higher amount of energy and put larger computational overheads on Wireless Sensor Nodes. An effective corporate key management and distribution policy is required to maintain the security of the wireless sensor nodes without compromising battery power. None of the current commercial systems (either based on software or hardware security modules) or research proposals effectively address both challenges. This paper represents an improved key management architecture, called KISS for the WSNs, to enable comprehensive, trustworthy, user-verifiable, and cost-effective key management. KISS allows only authorized applications and/or users to use the keys. Using simple devices, administrators can remotely issue authenticated commands to KISS and verify system output.