A backbone assisted hybrid key management scheme for WSN

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are receiving increased focus due to their applicability to crucial applications like military, healthcare, habitat monitoring etc. However, wireless communication poses additional threats to the critical information being sent over the wireless media. Therefore there is a dire need to have a secure way of communication for a WSN. Public Key Cryptography (PKC) holds the capacity to provide much needed security to WSN; however it is considered an expensive option for already constrained network. On the contrary, Symmetric Key Cryptography (SKC) is considered ideal for resource hungry WSN, nevertheless it has drawbacks too. In this paper we present a secure and reliable key management scheme for backbone assisted WSNs. Our scheme deploys both the symmetric and public key cryptography. We utilize PKC for node authentication and to share the initial secret key. SKC is then used for subsequent communication. We analyze performance of our proposed scheme and compare it with the existing approaches. We prove that our scheme is much more secure and stable and outperforms other schemes in terms of communication and memory overheads.