Symmetric Key‐Based Authentication with an Application to Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter starts with an introduction on different methods to provide key establishment and authentication using symmetric key‐based mechanisms limited to hashing, xoring and encryption/decryption operations. Based on an idea coming from the context of multi‐server authentication, and already applied in several IoT contexts, we present a new key management protocol for wireless sensor networks with hierarchical architecture, using solely symmetric key‐based operations. The protocol establishes confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. It supports various communication scenarios, has limited storage requirements, is highly energy efficient by minimizing the number of communication phases and cryptographic operations, and avoids message fragmentation as much as possible. With the pre‐installation of an individual secret key with the base station and some additional key material different for cluster head and cluster node, all possible keys in the network can be efficiently on‐the‐fly computed and updated. We discuss the differences with the well‐known LEAP key management system for wireless sensor networks.