SCARKER: A sensor capture resistance and key refreshing scheme for mobile WSNs

How to discover a captured node and to resist node capture attack is a challenging task in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose a node capture resistance and key refreshing scheme for mobile WSNs which is based on the Chinese remainder theorem. The scheme is able of providing forward secrecy, backward secrecy and collusion resistance for diminishing the effects of capture attacks. By implementing our scheme on a Sun SPOT based sensor network testbed, we demonstrate that the time for updating a new group key varies from 56 ms to 546 ms and the energy consumption is limited to 16.5–225 mJ, depending on the length of secret keys and the number of sensors in a group.