IKM -- An Identity based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Abstract

<p class="Abstract">Wireless sensor networks applications are growing and so are their security needs. However, due to severe memory, computing and communication limitations, wireless sensor networks security presents tremendous challenges. Central to any security service, key management is a fundamental cryptographic primitive to provide other security operations. In this paper, we propose IKM, an identity based key management scheme designed for heterogeneous sensor networks. This scheme provides a high level of security as it is based on a variant of public key cryptography named pairing identity based cryptography. The IKM scheme supports the establishment of two types of keys, pairwise key to enable point to point communication between pairs of neighbouring nodes, and cluster key to make in-network processing feasible in each cluster of nodes. IKM also supports the addition of new nodes and re-keying mechanism. A security analysis is presented to prove the scheme resilience against several types of attacks especially the node compromise attack. We also perform an overhead analysis of the proposed scheme in terms of storage, communication, and computation requirements. To demonstrate the feasibility of this scheme, we present implementation and performance evaluation of the proposed scheme on Crossbow TelosB motes running TinyOS. The results indicate that it can be deployed efficiently in resource-constrained sensor networks that need a high level of security.</p&gt

A Secure Key Management Framework for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In this section, we demonstrate some considerable hierarchical heterogeneous key management schemes proposed until now and analyse their advantages and disadvantages [11][12][13][14].…”

“…PIBK is another identity based key management protocol for HHWSN [14]. PIBK has been designed for a static network with fixed and location aware SNs that use IBC to establish pairwise keys.…”

“…Since message confidentiality and sender's authentication in CLs-BS links have a particular emphasis, digital signature and ECC have been used in many key management schemes to drive confidentiality, integrity and authenticity [11][12][13][14][15][16]. In contrast, according to the computational and memory constraints in WSN, it is not acceptable to utilize signature-then-encryption method to keep message confidentiality and authenticity permanently among WSN's nodes.…”

“…One of the crucial parts of the proposed key management infrastructure that is usually ignored in heterogeneous WSN is "periodic authentication" [11][12][13][14]. Since SNs in contrast to CLs are not equipped with tamper-proof hardware, it is completely probable that a SN is compromised after deployment.…”

“…Node Capture Attack : In node capture attack, an adversary gains full control over sensor nodes through direct physical access [14]. According to the importance of CL-BS and CL-CL links, not only is public key cryptography (signcryption method with forward secrecy) used in BS-CL and CL-CL links but also the hardware of CLs is defined tamper-proof in our scheme.…”