A novel key management method for wireless sensor networks

Key management is one of the most important issues of any secure communication. With the increasing demand for the transmission security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is urgent to introduce the secure and reliable key management scheme into the WSNs. In this paper, we proposed a hierarchical key management scheme to ensure the security of the network services and applications in WSNs. Comparing to the group key management protocol, our proposed method can save more computing and transmission energy through hierarchical design. Moreover, we improve the OFT (one-way hash function tree) by CRT (Chinese Remainder Theorem) so that it can be used in the large-scale WSNs. We designed some experiment to evaluate the security and performance of this method, and the experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve satisfying results.