A study on key management schemes for wireless seneor networks

Abstract

In the ubiquitous environment, Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) is the most important infrastructure. WSN usually consists of a large number of tiny sensor nodes with limited computation capacity, memory space and power resource. Typically WSNs are deployed at high density in regions requiring surveillance and monitoring. In military applications, sensor nodes may be deployed in unattended or hostile environments such as battle fields. Individually each sensor node senses many interesting phenomena with simple computations and transfers this information to others or base-station using wireless communication channel. WSNs are, therefore, vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks like eavesdropping, masquerading, traffic-analysis, etc. Hence, it is important to protect communications among sensor nodes to maintain message confidentiality and integrity. However, for this, the utilization of public key cryptosystems is infeasible since sensor nodes suffer from resource constraints like low power, limited computation capability, communications, etc. therefore the symmetric key cryptosystems are usually facilitated for WSNs to establish the secure communication channel between sensor nodes. Hence, recent researches mainly focus on the efficient key pre-distribution scheme for sharing the secret keys between sensor nodes to utilize the symmetric cryptosystems. Recently, many random key pre-distribution schemes[14,11,8,7,18,19] have been proposed. The main advantage of random key pre-distribution schemes is that communication costs per sensor node are constant regardless of the total number of sensor nodes in the WSN. Random key pre-distribution was first proposed by Eschenauer $\It{et al}$. chan $\It{et al}$. extended this scheme to enhance the security and resilience of the network using q-compositeness. Du $\It{et al}$. and Liu $\It{et al}$. further extended random key pre-distribution approach to pair wise key pre-distribution approach in which the shared ...