A hierarchical key management scheme for wireless sensor networks based on identity-based encryption

Limited resources (such as energy, computing power, storage, and so on) make it impractical for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to deploy traditional security schemes. In this paper, a hierarchical key management scheme is proposed on the basis of identity-based encryption (IBE). This proposed scheme not only converts the distributed flat architecture of the WSNs to a hierarchical architecture for better network management but also ensures the independence and security of the sub-networks. This paper firstly reviews the identity-based encryption, particularly, the Boneh-Franklin algorithm. Then a novel hierarchical key management scheme based on the basic Boneh-Franklin and Diffie-Hellman (DH) algorithms is proposed. At last, the security and efficiency of our scheme is discussed by comparing with other identity-based schemes for flat architecture of WSNs.