An efficient and highly resilient key management scheme for wireless sensor networks

Key management is a corner stone service for any security solution for WSNs. Resources limitation of WSNs makes the public key based solutions, which offer more efficient key management services, unsuitable for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient tree-based probabilistic key management scheme which is highly resilient against node capture attacks. Our solution is based on symmetric cryptography with a probabilistic key pre-distribution. We introduce a new approach to enhance resilience by concealing keys through the use of a simple hash function mechanism. We further improve resiliency by using the number of shared keys as criteria to construct the secure tree. We provide analytical analysis and extensive simulations which show that our solution enhances the network resilience against node capture without introducing any overhead comparatively to similar solutions in the literature.