Re-keying mechanism for TinySec using ECC and Hash chains

Due to the myriad range of applications in environmental monitoring, wireless sensor network (WSN) have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Since WSN suffer from many constraints including lower processing power, low battery life and small memory, security becomes the main concern to deal with such kind of networks. Due to these well accepted limitations, WSN is not able to deal with traditional cryptographic algorithms. TinySec is one the most successful implementation for providing basic security primitives with low computational overhead however the major drawback lies in its Re-Keying mechanism. In this paper, an improved Re-Keying mechanisms based on hash chains and Elliptical Curve Cryptography has been introduced. The mechanism has been simulated in TinyOS using Tossim simulator. Performance benchmarking of the proposed protocols has also been carried out.