A Pairing Identity based Key Management Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Key management in wireless sensor networks is still a challenging problem. Most existing research considers symmetric cryptosystems to achieve key agreement assuming homogenous network architecture. However, these solutions suffer from performance bottleneck and poor scalability. Recently, deployed sensor network systems are increasingly following heterogeneous designs. In this paper, we propose a key management protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks based on an asymmetric cryptosystem named pairing identity based cryptography. We show that the proposed protocol has low communication and storage overhead. Moreover, our protocol assures key update and forward secrecy. We discuss the resilience of the proposed scheme against several types of attacks. Formal security validation, using the AVISPA tool, is used to demonstrate the privacy of the generated keys and the robustness of our protocol against several attacks.