An IPC key management scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consists of low power nodes, with limited processing, communication, and storage. The networks are made up of tiny nodes which are becoming future of many applications, but due to deployment nature the sensor nodes are prone to physical attacks against the adversaries and resource limitations raises some serious question to secure these nodes. Random failure of nodes occurred in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to the resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security is a challenging task in WSN and basic security goals in sensor networks are Confidentiality, Integrity, Authentication and Availability (CIAA). Many security solutions have been proposed in the domain so far. Due to a number of physical constraints in sensor nodes, traditional cryptographic mechanisms are not suitable to deal with such potential security threats. This paper is devoted to the research on security efficiency for wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme of Individual Pairwise and Cluster (IPC) key management is based on the generation and distribution of the individual key, pairwise key and the cluster head broadcast key. This paper proposes a solution which uses the basic scheme, but does not use group-based deployment model and pre-deployment knowledge of the locations of nodes, and yet performs better than the schemes which uses the group-based deployment. The security analysis shows that the scheme within this paper meets the unique security needs of the sensor networks.