VEGK: Virtual ECC group key for wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of smart sensor nodes cooperated together for achieving the desire of the assigned application. However, these nodes suffer from different limitations including memory available, computational and communicational limitations. Clustering these nodes is considered as one of the main solutions for prolonging the lifetime of the network. At the same time, security is another challenge for WSNs due to the critical information wirelessly transferred through the network. In this paper, we propose a security framework called Virtual ECC Group Key (VEGK) merging Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with symmetric pairwise keys along with virtual ECC group keys. In addition, we believe that merging the security with clustering will be beneficial to the energy saving in WSN. Based on the analysis of different scenarios, our proposed security framework is proved to protect the network from many attacks.