Biblio

A major issue to secure wireless sensor networks is key distribution. Current key distribution schemes are not fully adapted to the tiny, low-cost, and fragile sensors with limited computation capability, reduced memory size, and battery-based power supply. This paper investigates the design of an efficient key distribution and management scheme for wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme can ensure the generation and distribution of different encryption keys intended to secure individual and group communications. This is performed based on elliptic curve public key encryption using Diffie-Hellman like key exchange and secret sharing techniques that are applied at different levels of the network topology. This scheme is more efficient and less complex than existing approaches, due to the reduced communication and processing overheads required to accomplish key exchange. Furthermore, few keys with reduced sizes are managed in sensor nodes which optimizes memory usage, and enhances scalability to large size networks.

Key management is the core to ensure the communication security of wireless sensor network. How to establish efficient key management in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a challenging problem for the constrained energy, memory, and computational capabilities of the sensor nodes. Previous research on sensor network security mainly considers homogeneous sensor networks with symmetric key cryptography. Recent researches have shown that using asymmetric key cryptography in heterogeneous sensor networks (HSN) can improve network performance, such as connectivity, resilience, etc. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of symmetric key cryptography and asymmetric key cryptography, the paper propose an efficient and hybrid key management method for heterogeneous wireless sensor network, cluster heads and base stations use public key encryption method based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), while using symmetric encryption method between adjacent nodes in the cluster. The analysis and simulation results show that the proposed key management method can provide better security, prefect scalability and connectivity with saving on storage space.