A Security Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks Utilizing a Unique Session Key

Key management is a core mechanism to ensure the security of applications and network services in wireless sensor networks. It includes two aspects: key distribution and key revocation. Many key management protocols have been specifically designed for wireless sensor networks. However, most of the key management protocols focus on the establishment of the required keys or the removal of the compromised keys. The design of these key management protocols does not consider the support of higher level security applications. When the applications are integrated later in sensor networks, new mechanisms must be designed. In this paper, we propose a security framework, uKeying, for wireless sensor networks. This framework can be easily extended to support many security applications. It includes three components: a security mechanism to provide secrecy for communications in sensor networks, an efficient session key distribution scheme, and a centralized key revocation scheme. The proposed framework does not depend on a specific key distribution scheme and can be used to support many security applications, such as secure group communications. Our analysis shows that the framework is secure, efficient, and extensible. The simulation and results also reveal for the first time that a centralized key revocation scheme can also attain a high efficiency

Dynamic key ring update mechanism for mobile wireless sensor networks

Key distribution is an important issue to provide security in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Many of the key pre-distribution schemes proposed for static WSNs perform poorly when they are applied to Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs). In this paper, we propose Dynamic Key Ring Update (DKRU) mechanism for MWSNs. The aim of DKRU mechanism is to enable sensor nodes to update their key rings periodically during movement, by observing the frequent keys in their neighbors. Our mechanism can be used together with different key pre-distribution schemes and it helps to increase the performance of them. For the performance evaluation basis, we used our mechanism together with a location based key pre-distribution scheme. Our results show that DKRU mechanism increases the local and global connectivity when it is applied to MWSNs. Moreover, our mechanism does not cause a significant degradation in network resiliency

Efficient key management in wireless sensor network security

Wireless sensor network is a multi-hop ad hoc network formed by a large number of low-cost micro-sensor nodes which communicate through radio channels. It is widely used in many areas in modern society and attracts a lot of attention from researchers. This research is on wireless sensor network security and it focuses on key management in hierarchical wireless sensor networks. Through literature review, the drawback and weakness of existing key management schemes are analyzed from various aspects including key establishment, key distribution, key update, authentication and node operation mechanism. Assessment criteria for key management scheme are proposed under different requirements and constraints of wireless sensor networks. The security criteria cover keying model, key distribution, key update, node operation and resilience. For cluster based hierarchical wireless sensor networks, an assistant node is introduced in a cluster to deal with the situation of cluster head compromise and to keep the member nodes securely staying in the network. With introduction of assistant nodes, a complete secure efficient hierarchical key management scheme (SEHKM) for wireless sensor network is proposed. The scheme supports three types of keys and the big improvement over existing key management schemes is on group key update, which is based on pseudo-random numbers and group Diffie-Hellman. The analysis and evaluation have shown that that SEHKM offers strong security with efficient operation from energy consumption point of view

A Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Deployment Knowledge

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt messages sent among sensor nodes. Keys for encryption purposes must be agreed upon by communicating nodes. Due to resource constraints, achieving such key agreement in wireless sensor networks is non-trivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and public-key based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks. Pre-distribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of memory used when the network size is large. Recently, a random key predistribution scheme and its improvements have been proposed

A Pairwise Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper, we provide a framework in which to study the security of key pre-distribution schemes, propose a new key pre-distribution scheme which substantially improves the resilience of the network compared to previous schemes, and give an in-depth analysis of our scheme in terms of network resilience and associated overhead. Our scheme exhibits a nice threshold property: when the number of compromised nodes is less than the threshold, the probability that communications between any additional nodes are compromised is close to zero. This desirable property lowers the initial payoff of smaller-scale network breaches to an adversary, and makes it necessary for the adversary to attack a large fraction of the network before it can achieve any significant gain

A Pairwise Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

To achieve security in wireless sensor networks, it is important to be able to encrypt and authenticate messages sent between sensor nodes. Before doing so, keys for performing encryption and authentication must be agreed upon by the communicating parties. Due to resource constraints, however, achieving key agreement in wireless sensor networks is non-trivial. Many key agreement schemes used in general networks, such as Diffie-Hellman and other public-key based schemes, are not suitable for wireless sensor networks due to the limited computational abilities of the sensor nodes. Pre-distribution of secret keys for all pairs of nodes is not viable due to the large amount of memory this requires when the network size is large. In this paper, we provide a framework in which to study the security of key pre-distribution schemes, propose a new key pre-distribution scheme which substantially improves the resilience of the network compared to previous schemes, and give an in-depth analysis of our scheme in terms of network resilience and associated overhead. Our scheme exhibits a nice threshold property: when the number of compromised nodes is less than the threshold, the probability that communications between any additional nodes are compromised is close to zero. This desirable property lowers the initial payoff of smaller-scale network breaches to an adversary, and makes it necessary for the adversary to attack a large fraction of the network before it can achieve any significant gain

Security in heterogeneous wireless networks

The proliferation of a range of wireless devices, from the cheap low power resource starved sensor nodes to the ubiquitous cell phones and PDA\u27s has resulted in their use in many applications. Due to their inherent broadcast nature Security and Privacy in wireless networks is harder than the wired networks. Along with the traditional security requirements like confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation new requirements like privacy and anonymity are important in wireless networks. These factors combined with the fact that nodes in a wireless network may have different resource availabilities and trust levels makes security in wireless networks extremely challenging. The functional lifetime of sensor networks in general is longer than the operational lifetime of a single node, due to limited battery power. Therefore to keep the network working multiple deployments of sensor nodes are needed. In this thesis, we analyze the vulnerability of the existing key predistribution schemes arising out of the repeated use of fixed key information through multiple deployments. We also develop SCON, an approach for key management that provides a significant improvement in security using multiple key pools. SCON performs better in a heterogeneous environment. We present a key distribution scheme that allows mobile sensor nodes to connect with stationary nodes of several networks. We develop a key distribution scheme for a semi ad-hoc network of cell phones. This scheme ensures that cell phones are able to communicate securely with each other when the phones are unable to connect to the base station. It is different from the traditional ad hoc networks because the phones were part of a centralized network before the base station ceased to work. This allows efficient distribution of key material making the existing schemes for ad hoc networks ineffective. In this thesis we present a mechanism for implementing authenticated broadcasts which ensure non-repudiation using identity based cryptography. We also develop a reputation based mechanism for the distributed detection and revocation of malicious cell phones. Schemes which use the cell phone for secure spatial authentication have also been presented

Polynomial based key predistribution scheme in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have the ability to integrate with other networks while providing a fast and cost-saving deployment. The network security is one of important challenge problems in this kind of networks. This paper is focused on key management between mesh and sensor networks. We propose an efficient key pre-distribution scheme based on two polynomials in wireless mesh networks by employing the nature of heterogeneity. Our scheme realizes the property of bloom filters, i.e., neighbor nodes can discover their shared keys but have no knowledge on the different keys possessed by the other node, without the probability of false positive. The analysis presented in this paper shows that our scheme has the ability to establish three different security level keys and achieves the property of self adaptive security for sensor networks with acceptable computation and communication consumption