In recent years, wireless sensor networks have been used in a variety of environments; a wireless network infrastructure, established to communicate and exchange information in a monitoring area, has also been applied in different environments. However, for sensitive applications, security is the paramount issue. In this paper, we propose using bilinear pairing to design dynamic key management and authentication scheme of the hierarchical sensor network. We use the dynamic key management and the pairing-based cryptography (PBC) to establish the session key and the hash message authentication code (HMAC) to support the mutual authentication between the sensors and the base station. In addition, we also embed the capability of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to cluster nodes to find the best path of the sensor network. The proposed scheme can also provide the requisite security of the dynamic key management, mutual authentication, and session key protection. Our scheme can defend against impersonation attack, replay attack, wormhole attack, and message manipulation attack.

In recent years, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have tended to transmit data hop by hop, from sensor nodes through cluster nodes to the base station. As a result, users must collect data from the base station. This study considers two different applications: hop by hop transmission of data from cluster nodes to the base station and the direct access to cluster nodes data by mobile users via mobile devices. Due to the hardware limitations of WSNs, some low-cost operations such as symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions are used to implement a dynamic key management. The session key can be updated to prevent threats of attack from each communication. With these methods, the data gathered in wireless sensor networks can be more securely communicated. Moreover, the proposed scheme is analyzed and compared with related schemes. In addition, an NS2 simulation is developed in which the experimental results show that the designed communication protocol is workable.