Key management is the basic building block of all the security protocols and is one of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Centralising a trusted key management server is not an appropriate solution in such fully distributed networks. On the other hand, designing a distributed key management system is a challenging task, due to the constrained characteristics of sensor nodes, which are limited in storage, computation, communication, and energy. In the literature, there is a hot research effort on key management purpose for WSNs. The greatest part of the existing solutions focuses mainly on the optimisation of the key number, rekeying frequency and process or the encryption system of the distributed keys. Unfortunately, these systems are implemented as an additional and independent service, involving a considerable overhead. In this study, the authors propose µKMS (micro key management system) for WSNs. µKMS implements a dissimulation scheme, embedding the rekeying process messages on the unexploited coding space of the exchanged ZigBee packets. They have developed simulations, where the obtained results show the relevance of µKMS in terms of communication overhead, storage overhead, and energy consumption.

In wireless sensor networks, security is one of the most challenging issues. An attack against sensors or the intruder intervention in the zone of interest can deny the integrity of the exchanged data between the sensors and the base station. In this paper, we propose a technique of data integrity protection using a novel method of shared cryptography for wireless sensor networks. Our proposal considers a cluster-based network. Sensor nodes belonging to a cluster are supervised by a cluster-head. The latter aggregates securely the sensed data and transmits them to the base station. Before sending the sensed data to the cluster-head, the sensor nodes encrypt partially the message using a shared cryptography protocol. The cluster-head reconstitutes the message in order to authenticate the integrity of the transmitted data. We have developed simulations, in which the obtained results show the performances of our protocol in terms of communication overhead and energy consumption.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are omnipresent in a multitude of applications. One of the important common requirements of these applications is the data security. Indeed, the exchanged data in WSNs are often considered as a preferred target, which can be a subject of several threats, such as eavesdropping, replay, falsification, alteration, etc. Another important common requirement of WSNs applications is data aggregation. Indeed, the limitations of such networks in terms of energy, bandwidth and storage accentuate the need of data aggregation. In this paper, we address these two issues. We propose a new efficient approach for data integrity and credibility protection for WSNs, while ensuring the data aggregation. We consider a cluster-based network architecture, where sensor nodes are equally distributed in clusters. Each sensor node is in charge to deliver one bit of the sensed data and at the same time observe the remaining parts through a parity control based encryption approach. In this manner, the sensed data could be effectively and securely controlled with a low overhead compared to the classical aggregation approaches, where all the nodes transmit individually the sensed data. To validate the proposed protocol we have simulated it using the simulator CupCarbon and in order to evaluate its efficiency in terms of energy, we have developed a prototype with the TelosB platform, where the obtained results show that our method is less energy consuming. 1