Title: An improved key pre-distribution scheme based on the security level classification of keys for wireless sensor networks

Authors: Jianmin Zhang; Hua Li; Jian Li

Addresses: College of Computer, Henan Institute of Engineering, Zhengzhou 451191, China ' College of Computer, Henan Institute of Engineering, Zhengzhou 451191, China ' College of Computer, Henan Institute of Engineering, Zhengzhou 451191, China

Abstract: The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in any real-world application requires a certain level of security. To provide security of operations such as message exchange, key management schemes have to be well adapted to the particularities of WSNs. Unfortunately, the resource limitation of sensor nodes poses a great challenge for designing an efficient and effective key establishment scheme for WSNs. This paper proposes a novel key management scheme. In the proposed scheme, the pre-distributed keys in nodes are classified different security levels and the higher security level of the pre-distributed key in compromised nodes will disclose the fewer pre-distributed keys in the uncompromised nodes than that of the lower security level of the pre-distributed key. The proposed scheme is analysed based on connectivity, resistance against attacks, memory consumption and communication overhead. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme has a good resilience against node compromising attacks compared to the existing schemes.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; key predistribution; security level classification; hash function.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2020.103999

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2020 Vol.12 No.1, pp.40 - 52

Received: 25 Oct 2016
Accepted: 23 Feb 2018
Published online: 05 Dec 2019 *

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