UBKM: A Usage-Based Key Management Protocol for Distributed Sensor Networks

Due to the growing number of applications of wireless sensor networks in recent years, it´s necessary to protect wireless sensor networks from various attacks. Making use of key management is an effective and important way to achieve such goal. Since different types of messages exchanged between sensor nodes have different security requirements and there may be special demand in the network, a single keying mechanism is not suitable for meeting all of them. According to the above, in this paper, a Usage-based key management protocol (UBKM) is described for sensor networks that based on four kinds of keys which can be derived from an initial master key. It´s designed to restrict the security impact of a captured node to the rest network. In addition, UBKM meets the requirement of energy efficiency by supporting in-network process. The master key protection and key revocation mechanisms are discussed in this paper as well as the authentication mechanism based on the use of one-way hash function. Finally, the consumption and performance of UBKM is analyzed and its security and efficiency in protecting the sensor network is shown. In this paper, promising research directions are mentioned which can be a focus of future research.