A novel key management scheme for hierarchical wireless sensor networks

Due to the hostile environment and the limitations of the wireless sensor networks (WSN for short), a feasible and efficient key management scheme becomes one of the critical issues in WSN. Many protocols proposed before didn't pay much attention to the key protection and revocation issues. So, to address these problems, we put forward a new dynamically clustering key management scheme based on secret sharing for WSN. In this paper, we divide the master key into several sub keys by adopting the main idea of threshold secret sharing scheme, combing the clustering structure of WSN with dynamic key management scheme, and finally propose a new key management scheme. Compared to other key management schemes, our protocol has strong security and resistance of captured attack as well as low computational overhead and storage.