Efficient and Non-Interactive Hierarchical Key Agreement in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have many applications, vary in size, and are deployed in a wide variety of areas. They are often deployed in potentially adverse or even hostile environment so that there are concerns on security issues in these WSNs. Sensor nodes used are resource-constrained, which make security applications a challenging problem. Key agreement is a fundamental security service in WSNs; it enables sensor nodes to communicate securely with each other using cryptographic techniques. However, due to the resource constraints on sensor nodes, it is infeasible to use traditional key management techniques such as public key cryptography and key distribution center. Recently, Guo et al. proposed an efficient and non-interactive hierarchical key agreement protocol applicable to mobile ad-hoc networks, which has good properties including non-interactive, hierarchical, resilient, etc. The purpose of this paper is to propose a non-interactive hierarchical key agreement protocol over the hierarchical WSNs, which is a revision of Guo et al.’s protocol for the WSNs due to their protocol’s good properties. Our revision inherit advantages from Guo et al.’s protocol and well suited to the hierarchical WSNs.