An Adaptive Key Management Framework for the Wireless Mesh and Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are popular research subjects. The interconnection of both network types enables next-generation applications and creates new optimization opportunities. Currently, plenty of protocols are available on the security of either wireless sensor networks or wireless mesh networks, an investigation in peer work underpins the fact that neither of these protocols is adapt to the interconnection of these network types. The internal cause relies on the fact that they differ in terms of complexity, scalability and network abstraction level. Therefore, in this article, we propose a unified security framework with three key management protocols, MPKM, MGKM, and TKM which are able to provide basic functionalities on the simplest devices and advanced functionalities on high performance nodes. We perform a detailed performance evaluation on our protocols against some important metrics such as scalability, key connectivity and compromise resilience, and we also compare our solution to the current keying protocols for WSNs and WMNs.

Providing End-to-End Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Protocols are also designed for authentication of packets and nodes, and confidentiality for important packets in the network. Other works like [17], [18], [19] propose ideas for key management in hierarchical sensor networks emphasizing on aspects like key updation and revocation, energy efficiency, and mitigating attacks like guessing attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle and denial of service attacks. Unfortunately, the downsides of such works are in the complexity in key pre-distribution and subsequent pairwise key set-up, which increases overhead.…”