An Efficient Key Management Scheme for Wireless Network

Sensor networks have great potential to be employed in mission critical situations like battlefields but also in more everyday security and commercial applications such as building and traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes etc. However, wireless sensor networks pose unique security challenges. While the deployment of sensor nodes in an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes conventional security solutions unfeasible. Key Management is a major challenge to achieve security in wireless sensor networks. In most of the schemes presented for key management in wireless sensor networks, it is assumed that the sensor nodes have the same capability. This research presents a security framework WSNSF (Wireless Sensor Networks Security Framework) to provide a comprehensive security solution against the known attacks in sensor networks. The proposed framework consists of four interacting components: a secure triple-key (STKS) scheme, secure routing algorithms (SRAs), a secure localization technique (SLT) and a malicious node detection mechanism. Singly, each of these components can achieve certain level of security. However, when deployed as a framework, a high degree of security is achievable. WSNSF takes into consideration the communication and computation limitations of sensor networks. While there is always a tradeoff between security and performance, experimental results prove that the proposed framework can achieve high degree of security, transmission overheads and perfect resilience against node capture. KeywordsWireless Sensor Networks, Secure triple key, Routing algorithms, Localization technique. —————————— ——————————