Lightweight Noninteractive Membership Authentication and Group Key Establishment for WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) exhibit their potential capacity in the next generation of mobile communication networks and wireless systems (5G). Collected data in WSNs are different from most data transmitted in digital communication applications. Most collected data in WSNs contain only few bits of information. Conventional protocols are not suitable for WSNs since this environment needs more flexible and lightweight protocols for secure group communications. Hence, how to realize the mutual secure and lightweight communication is a big challenge for WSNs. User authentication and key establishment are two fundamental security services in secure communications for WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel design which embeds the function of membership authentication and group key establishment in WSNs. By using an asymmetric bivariate polynomial, membership authentication and pairwise shared keys distribution are realized. Then, each member mixes his/her input with pairwise shared keys with other members and releases the encrypted value in a broadcast channel. After collecting all released values, each member can compute the group key efficiently. Our proposal is noninteractive and lightweight. As it enjoys low computation and communication costs compared with the state-of-the-art cryptographic solutions, this design is more suitable for efficient membership authentication and group key establishment in WSNs.

Simple and Effective Secure Group Communications in Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a growing area of research in terms of applications, life enhancement and security. Research interests vary from enhancing network performance and decreasing overhead computation to solving security flaws. Secure Group Communication (SGC) is gaining traction in the world of network security. Proposed solutions in this area focus on generating, sharing and distributing a group key among all group members in a timely manner to secure their communication and reduce the computation overhead. This method of security is called SGC-Shared Key. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective way to secure the network through Hashed IDs (SGC-HIDs). In our proposed method, we distribute a shared key among the group of nodes in the network. Each node would have the ability to compute the group key each time it needs to. We provide a security analysis for our method as well as a performance evaluation. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, we present for the first time a definition of joining or leaving attack. Furthermore, we describe several types of such an attack as well as the potential security impacts that occur when a network is being attacked.