Key Management Mechanism for Authentication Security in Wireless Sensor Network

Since the multi-user broadcast authentication protocol in current WSN cannot provide strong safety, perfect scalability and low energy consumption simultaneously. A certificateless key managing scheme based on identity is studied in this paper. The proposed method divides the broadcasting in WSN into two parts: users broadcasting and base station broadcasting. We also adopt different password schemes for system safety. At the user end, a short signature protocol is used for signature and authentication on the broadcasting packet to acquire scalability and low power consumption; at the base station end, partial message recovered Schnorr signature is adopted to protect its broadcasting. In addition, we use the user private protecting scheme based on passwords to resist compromising attacks. Because our improved protocol is based on certificateless signature protocols, it avoids the key escrow problems compared to existing authentication protocols and acquires safety with higher level. The simulations show that the scheme has lowered the power consumption at least 40% without sacrifice in safety and efficiency.