Dynamic Group-Based Key Establishment for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Key establishment and its management in wireless sensor networks is a challenging problem due to the limited resources and disordered structure of such networks. In this paper we propose a dynamic group-based key management technique. In our solution, a large-scale network is divided into small logical groups. Each group is assigned a unique master key that will be used to generate other distinct keys between pairs of nodes inside the group. In this way we provide secure communications between nodes, robust against node capture attack. Unlike other techniques ours is highly scalable and application independent and can be used both in indoors and outdoors applications whilst reducing memory overhead and maintaining maximum connectivity.