Energy Efficient Key Menagement Scheme for Clustered Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Key management is an important challenging issue in wireless sensor networks (WSN) to provide the confidentiality and authenticity for the sensitive data, which is sensed by the sensors from various fields. Various studies have focused on authentication and key establishment schemes in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication protocol and secure key management scheme using Elliptic Curve Cryptographie and Diffie-Hellman algorithm, conforms to the security requirements of mobile heterogeneous sensor networks. This solution provide a secure channel, between different communication nodes, as a solution to improve the protection of WSNs. We propose a dynamic method of preload of sensors, which make sure that the deployed nodes initialize themselves, and a key agreement protocol which make two nodes to establish a secure pairwise key. A set of experiments has been conducted to assess the performance of the proposed scheme with other schemes, and we found that our protocol considerably reduces the energy cost, computational load, and resist against attacks.