An Efficient Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Hostile Environments

Key management in sensor networks is the core security protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the hostile environment. Sensor nodes have highly constrained resource like limited battery power, memory, processing capabilities, etc. These limitations make infeasible to apply traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography in the WSNs. For the existing key pre-distribution schemes, as the number of compromised nodes increases, the fraction of affected pairwise keys increase quickly. As a result, a small number of compromised nodes may affect a large fraction of pairwise. In this paper, we present an efficient key management scheme to deal with this problem. In the proposed scheme, after pairwise key establishment all attackers can't get any key information of uncompromised sensor nodes from compromised sensors. The analysis shows that this scheme provides robustness in design and outperforms the previous schemes in term of the network resiliency against the node capture without increasing the memory requirement.