Modern wireless sensor networks have adopted the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. This standard defines the first two layers, the physical and medium access control layers; determines the radio wave used for communication; and defines the 128-bit advanced encryption standard (AES-128) for encrypting and validating the transmitted data. However, the standard does not specify how to manage, store, or distribute the encryption keys. Many solutions have been proposed to address this problem, but the majority are impractical in resource-constrained devices such as wireless sensor nodes or cause degradation of other metrics. Therefore, we propose an efficient and secure key distribution protocol that is simple, practical, and feasible to implement on resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes. We conduct simulations and hardware implementations to analyze our work and compare it to existing solutions based on different metrics such as energy consumption, storage overhead, key connectivity, replay attack, man-in-the-middle attack, and resiliency to node capture attack. Our findings show that the proposed protocol is secure and more efficient than other solutions.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s1810356
