Toward an Energy Efficient PKC-Based Key Management System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to wireless nature and hostile environment, security is a critical and vital task in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is known that key management is an integral part of a secure network. Unfortunately, in most of the previous methods, security is compromised in favor of reducing energy consumption. Consequently, they lack perfect resiliency and are not fit for applications with high security demands. To improve security of key management system, based on broadcast messages from base station, a novel key management system is proposed. Another problem with WSNs are dead nodes with cryptographic materials (like their keying materials) stored in them. Adversary may exploit these nodes to mount more effective attacks. Any secure key management system should also address this problem. It is argued that in the proposed method keying materials of dead nodes have lost their validity, and therefore are of no use for adversary. Finally, through simulation it is shown that proposed method is almost three times more energy efficient than conventional certificate based key management systems.