A Secure Key Management Scheme for Hierarchical WSN

Abstract

Many applications require WSNs to exchange sensitive information with the applications having high reliability requirements and a high level of security to succeed. The WSN nodes are often placed in hostile or adverse environment and their security concerns become a challenging issue. WSNs nodes are resource constrained and hence incorporating traditional security methods involving large computation overheads are not feasible. Key management is a fundamental part for any secure communication in WSNs. The key management system should be substantially secure, robust and efficient for a secure communication protocol. Many key establishment techniques have come up to address the tradeoffs between limited memory and security but choosing an effective scheme is debatable. Here in this paper, a new key management scheme is put forward based on authentication and key sharing for WSN. Our protocol is suitable for managing keys in a hierarchical network consisting of clusters with the aim of ensuring the survivability of the network.

Keywords: Authentication, Clusters, Key Management, Wireless Sensor Network.