KDSR: A Scalable Key Distribution Protocol to Secure Multi-Hop Routing in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

This article deals with a key distribution protocol to secure routing in large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and proposes a new protocol called KDSR. The authors' protocol has two originalities: to provide a secure network structure for large-scale WSNs, and to use lightweight local process to share efficiently the Local Broadcast Keys, the Pairwise Keys and the Global Broadcast Key. These keys are useful to secure several communication patterns in WSNs: one-to-many, one-to-one and one-to-all. Security analyses show that KDSR can withstand several attacks against WSNs. Through fast node revocation process, KDSR offers a good resilience against node capture. Immunity against MiM and replay attacks are well checked with the AVISPA tools. The experimentations are done on real TelosB motes and through the TOSSIM simulator. Simulation results confirm that KDSR is scalable, provides a good key connectivity and a good resilience. Comparison to earlier work shows that KDSR causes less computation complexity, less communication overhead and much less storage space even for large-scale WSNs.