Establishing secured communications in cluster based wireless sensor networks

The security of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a big challenge due to their resource-constraint nature. An efficient key management scheme is the pre-requisite to ensure security in WSN. In this paper we present a secured key management scheme adopted on cluster based topology of sensor network. The proposed scheme uses partial key pre-distribution and symmetric cryptography techniques, and shows high resilience to different security attacks. The scheme outperforms other random key pre-distribution protocols in the sense that it requires lower space, lower communication overhead and offers very high session key candidates.