Key Management in WSN Security

Abstract

To create a secure communication among the sensor nodes, a key establishment scheme is very important. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are usually left unattended and thus may attract the adversary to launch several attacks to the network operation. The exposure of the key during a node capture may disturb a large part of network communication. If there is a reliable, efficient, and secure KMS, disruption in the network to such an extent may not occur during a node capture attack. Several researchers have presented several key agreement schemes, but still the area is open to design an efficient attack resistant KMS. Sometimes, during the design of security protocols, the assumptions taken for the adversary behavior in sensor field may not reflect their actual behavior of the adversary in sensor field making these schemes less feasible in many real-world WSN applications. This chapter first discusses the challenges and security requirements, node capture attacks, its impact on the network, and some open issues of KMS solutions to this problem.