Secure clustering based SEP using Virtual ECC Group Key for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of self-organized smart motes for achieving the desire of the assigned application. However, for the different limitations facing these motes including memory available, computational and communicational limitations, clustering them is one of the main solutions for prolonging the lifetime of the network. At the same time, due to the critical information transferred through the network, security is considered as main challenge for WSNs. This paper proposes a new security framework called Virtual ECC Group Key (VEGK) merging Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with symmetric pairwise keys. In addition, we believe that merging security with clustering will be beneficial to the energy saving in WSN, this paper is based on Stable Election Protocol (SEP) based clustering. Based on the analysis of different scenarios, our proposed security framework is proved to protect the network from many attacks.