An Efficient Scheme for Key Pre-distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are the subject of widespread deployment in commercial and military environments that call for security. Since sensor networks pose unique challenges, traditional security techniques used in traditional networks cannot be directly applied. A previous work defines TinySec, a link layer security protocol for TinyOS to provide integrity and confidentiality of messages for WSN. However, TinySec employs a simple group key management where a single shared key is stored in each sensornode. This makes the network unsecured and vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, TinySec must be enhanced with a more robust key management scheme. This paper presents the integration of a proposed key management scheme as a more robust key management solution for TinyOS. The more secured TinyOS is evaluated in terms of key computation time, memory, and energy consumption overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the secure key management protocol introduces negligible overhead and does not affect the system performance. We also present performances comparison with two well known key distribution protocols, implemented specially for sensor networks namely, ECDLP and LEAP.