Mobile Agent Based Key Distribution Approach for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Key management is very crucial need in WSN to protect data and secure communications. One of the Key distribution solutions in WSN is symmetric key cryptography which is relatively faster and energy efficient. However, it cannot bestow high level of security due to difficulty in secure key management. Nevertheless, Asymmetric key cryptography can enhance network security but it also causes energy, memory and computational overhead. In this paper we proposed Mobile Agent Based Dynamic Key Management Scheme. This scheme has two levels that exploit good features of asymmetric and symmetric cryptography respectively. In the first level we introduced agent based key distribution and coordination for asymmetric keys while the second level is sensor nodes can involve in constructing symmetric keys for secure communication through mutual authentication and encryption with those keys. Agent based public key dissemination and update of shared keys could reduce communication overhead. We evaluated the system using NS2 simulations. The results reveal that the performance of the proposed scheme is significantly better in terms of communication, memory, and computation overheads when compared with its asymmetric counterparts. 66 Ramu Kuchipudi1, Dr. Ahmed Abdul Moiz Qyser, & Dr. V.V.S.S.S. Balaram