A New Group Key Management Protocol in WSNs Based on Secret Sharing

The application of wireless sensor networks to areas such as combat field surveillance, terrorist tracking and highway traffic monitoring requires secure communication among the sensor nodes, which under this collaborative model calls for efficient group key management. However, providing key management services in wireless sensor networks is complicated by their ad-hoc nature, intermittent connectivity, large scale, and resource limitations. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new energy-efficient key management scheme for networks based on secret sharing, in which the secret shares are calculated by the cluster heads which choose the one-order polynomial to improve efficiency, the symmetric keys preloaded into the nodes are used to encrypted secret shares to insure security. We analyzed the security and performance of this scheme compared with other ones. Comparison results show that our scheme is low in storage requirement, computational overhead and communication cost.