A low-energy key management protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have a wide spectrum of civil and military applications that call for security, e.g., target surveillance in hostile environments. Typical sensors possess limited computation, energy, and memory resources; therefore the use of vastly resource-consuming security mechanisms is not possible. In this paper, we propose a cryptographic key management protocol, which is based on the IBSK scheme, but only two symmetric keys are required to be pre-deployed at each sensor. The protocol supports the eviction of the compromised nodes. Simulation shows that the key management is remarkably low thanks to the multi-tier network architecture in which only sensor-to-gateway secure sessions are allowed, and reports order-of-magnitude improvement in energy saving as compared to the original IBSK scheme, and Kerberos-like schemes.