A Novel Hybrid Key Management Scheme for Establishing Secure Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Security is a critical issue when sensor nodes are deployed in a hostile environment. This paper proposes a novel Polynomial based Q composite random scheme for the establishment of triple key among communicating nodes in a network. The proposed scheme combines the robustness of Q-Composite Key Generation Scheme with the Polynomial Pool-Based Schemethat enables a secure communication between wireless sensor nodes. The security analysis shows that our scheme assures a high probability of secure communication with a low communication overhead. The simulation results prove that our scheme performs better in terms of network resilience against node capture attacks with a high probability of connectivity. The proposed scheme shows an improvement in compromised data links between non compromised sensors.Our scheme also provides high resilience in terms of the fraction of unaffected communication links against the compromised nodes even in the presence of a large number of malicious nodes.