Hierarchical Key Management Scheme with Probabilistic Security in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Abstract

Securing data transferred over a WSN is required to protect data from being compromised by attackers. Sensors in the WSN must share keys that are utilized to protect data transmitted between sensor nodes. There are several approaches introduced in the literature for key establishment in WSNs. Designing a key distribution/establishment scheme in WSNs is a challenging task due to the limited resources of sensor nodes. Polynomial-based key distribution schemes have been proposed in WSNs to provide a lightweight solution for resource-constraint devices. More importantly, polynomial-based schemes guarantee that a pairwise key exists between two sensors in the WSNs. However, one problem associated with all polynomial-based approaches in WSNs is that they are vulnerable to sensor capture attacks. Specifically, the attacker can compromise the security of the entire network by capturing a fixed number of sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel polynomial-based scheme with a probabilistic security feature that effectively reduces the security risk of sensor-captured attacks and requires minimal memory and computation overhead. Furthermore, our design can be extended to provide hierarchical key management to support data aggregation in WSNs.