IKM - An Identity based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks applications are growing and so are their security needs. However, due to severe memory, computing and communication limitations, wireless sensor networks security presents tremendous challenges. Central to any security service, key management is a fundamental cryptographic primitive to provide other security operations. In this paper, we propose IKM, an identity based key management scheme designed for heterogeneous sensor networks. This scheme provides a high level of security as it is based on a variant of public key cryptography named pairing identity based cryptography. The IKM scheme supports the establishment of two types of keys, pairwise key to enable point to point communication between pairs of neighbouring nodes, and cluster key to make in-network processing feasible in each cluster of nodes. IKM also supports the addition of new nodes and rekeying mechanism. A security analysis is presented to prove the scheme resilience against several types of attacks especially the node compromise attack. We also perform an overhead analysis of the proposed scheme in terms of storage, communication, and computation requirements. To demonstrate the feasibility of this scheme, we present implementation and performance evaluation of the proposed scheme on Crossbow TelosB motes running TinyOS. The results indicate that it can be deployed efficiently in resource-constrained sensor networks that need a high level of security.