A Misused Key Detection Mechanism for Hierarchical Routings in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks are generally deployed in hostile environment so the security service is the essential part of wireless sensor networks. To achieve the security service, key management is the fundamental one. Many key management schemes have been proposed considering the characteristics of sensor nodes. Despite the advances of key management techniques, wireless sensor networks still have vulnerable point. An attacker can easily compromise sensor nodes, and gets some keys from the compromised sensor nodes. These exposed keys may be used by the attacker to forge and modify messages between non-compromised nodes, and the attackers can mislead the application of wireless sensor networks. Recently, Liu and Dong introduced a scheme for detecting misused keys between non-compromised nodes. The performance of detecting a misused key is not bad in their scheme. However, the performance of power consumption is bad in hierarchical routings, because some additional message overheads are occurred at the receiving node and these overheads may be concentrated on only one node called cluster head. In this paper, we propose a misused key detection scheme for hierarchical routings. Our scheme reduces the overhead at the cluster node by decreasing a number of messages for detecting misused key. In our scheme, The misused key detection is performed at the cluster node so the additional messages are not needed any more.