Group Rekeying in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of many small sensor nodes and are commonly used to collect data and monitor hostile environments. Due to the factor of the cost, sensor nodes are lack of tamper-resistance and are deployed in unattended environments. Sensor nodes are easily captured by an intruder and compromised. An intruder will extract the secret elements in the sensor nodes including the group key. If an intruder knows the group key, he can use the group key to break down the wireless sensor network. To prevent a malicious intruder from knowing the group keys, the group keys should be updated for a period of time. In this paper, we focus on one of the distributed group rekeying called deterministic sequence-number-based group rekeying schemes and highlight the prone and cons of previous researches. According to recent studies it show the fact that there still many challenges exist in the group rekeying schemes.