A Hybrid Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Securing Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a type of ad hoc networks which consist of hundreds to thousands of sensor nodes. These sensor nodes collaborate to surveillance environment. WSNs have a variety of applications in military, industrial and other fields and they are fit to study environments that presence of human being is costly or dangerous. Sensor nodes have memory, energy and processing limitations. According to sensors' limitations and also increasing use of these networks in military fields, establishing a secure WSN is very important and challenging. Applying Key Predistribution Schemes (KPSs) is one of the effective and useful mechanisms to provide security in WSN. In this paper, a hybrid KPS is proposed that support three various keys, primary pairwise, polynomial, and ordinary. The proposed scheme has been implemented using J-SIM simulator and its performance has been evaluated in terms of maximum supportable network sizes and resiliency against node capture attack, by performing some experiments. Simulation results have been compared with Basic, q-Composite, RS, Cluster-Based, QS, and Double-Key Hash schemes. The compared results showed that the proposed scheme has a better resiliency against links disclosing via enemies.

Key Management in WSN Security

To create a secure communication among the sensor nodes, a key establishment scheme is very important. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are usually left unattended and thus may attract the adversary to launch several attacks to the network operation. The exposure of the key during a node capture may disturb a large part of network communication. If there is a reliable, efficient, and secure KMS, disruption in the network to such an extent may not occur during a node capture attack. Several researchers have presented several key agreement schemes, but still the area is open to design an efficient attack resistant KMS. Sometimes, during the design of security protocols, the assumptions taken for the adversary behavior in sensor field may not reflect their actual behavior of the adversary in sensor field making these schemes less feasible in many real-world WSN applications. This chapter first discusses the challenges and security requirements, node capture attacks, its impact on the network, and some open issues of KMS solutions to this problem.