A Node Revocation Scheme Using Public-Key Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks

Generally deployed in an unattended environment, a sensor network can be easily assaulted or compromised by adversaries. Network security becomes a major problem. A distributed node revocation scheme is effective in reducing the damages a compromised node may cause to a sensor network, but its operation tends to consume large-scale memory space of the hardware-constrained sensor nodes. To reduce such complexity, this paper presents a new distributed voting revocation scheme based on the one-way hash chain, the certificate revocation list and the public-key cryptography. Performance evaluation shows that our scheme outperforms the other target schemes in enhancing network security at reasonable calculation cost which is acceptable to the sensor nodes.