A lightweight and scalable key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks

In the Internet of Things (IoT), sensor technology is considered as an important part and is highly regarded. However, sensor nodes are inherently limited by insufficient resources such as energy, storage and communication. Therefore, designing an effective key management mechanism in WSNs has become an important issue. In this paper, a lightweight and scalable key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks is proposed. The scheme is based on Exclusion Basis System (EBS) for scalability and simple symmetric cryptographic primitives with low computational requirements. It provides periodic or on demand key refreshment and node authentication to improve the security of the network. In addition, it is highly efficient in terms of key refreshment and node revocation. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme has less energy consumption in key refreshment phase and has stronger network resilience against node capture than several existing schemes.