Hybrid cryptographic technique for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

The wireless sensor networks are always deployed in hostile and pervasive environment. They are prone to security threats and they do have a wide range of applications like military, environmental monitoring, health care, etc… traditional network security methods are not up to the mark due to limited resources. Several key management schemes have been proposed security in HSN. In this paper, we propose a key distribution scheme based on random key pre-distribution for heterogeneous sensor networks to achieve better security and performance compared to homogeneous networks, which is suffer from high communication overhead,computation overhead and high storage requirements. A combination of symmetric and asymmetric keys were tried (hybrid), where the cluster head and BS use public key encryption based on ECC, while using symmetric key encryption between the adjacent nodes in the cluster.