Toward an energy efficient PKC-based key management system for wireless sensor networks

Due to wireless nature and hostile environment, providing of security is a critical and vital task in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is known that key management is an integral part of a secure network. Unfortunately, in most of the previous methods, security is compromised in favor of reducing energy consumption. Consequently, they lack perfect resilience and are not fit for applications with high security demands. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to improve the security of key management system based on broadcast messages from the base station. Another problem with WSNs is the cryptographic materials (such as private keys) stored in dead nodes. Adversaries may exploit these nodes to mount more effective attacks. Any secure key management system should also address this problem. It is argued that in the proposed method keying materials of dead nodes lose their validity, and therefore are of no use for an adversary. Finally, it is shown through simulation that the proposed method is almost three times more energy-efficient than conventional certificate-based key management systems.