Centralized Key Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Today, key management is widely recognized as an important aspect of security in wireless sensor networks. In these networks, sensor nodes can be either mobile or static. Therefore, supporting the mobility of the nodes can be regarded as a purpose of key management schemes. In our previous work, we presented a key management scheme that was more efficient with respect to security and connectivity compared to the other ones. In that scheme, it is assumed that the nodes are static. In this paper we are going to present a scheme that supports the mobility of the nodes and makes the initial scheme more flexible. The basic criterion for the evaluation of the scheme is the communication overhead. First, the nodes establish a secure link with the cluster heads and then establish a secure link among themselves with the help of the cluster heads. We have analyzed this scheme with regards to the communication overhead and we will compare it with the other schemes.     

Public-key based access control in sensornet

Symmetric cryptography has been mostly used in security schemes in sensor networks due to the concern that public key cryptography (PKC) is too expensive for sensor devices. While these schemes are efficient in processing time, they generally require complicated key management, which may introduce high memory and communication overhead. On the contrary, PKC-based schemes have simple and clean key management, but cost more computational time. The recent progress in PKC implementation, specially elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), on sensors motivates us to design a PKC-based security scheme and compare its performance with the symmetric-key counterparts. This paper proposes a practical PKC-based access control for sensor networks, which consists of pairwise key establishment, local access control, and remote access control. We have implemented both cryptographic primitives on commercial off-the-shelf sensor devices. Building the user access control as a case study, we show that PKC-based protocol is more advantageous than those built on symmetric cryptography in terms of the memory usage, message complexity, and security resilience. Meanwhile, our work also provides insights in integrating and designing PKC-based security protocols for sensor networks.     

Dynamic key management in sensor networks

Numerous key management schemes have been proposed for sensor networks. The objective of key management is to dynamically establish and maintain secure channels among communicating nodes. Desired features of key management in sensor networks include energy awareness, localized impact of attacks, and scaling to a large number of nodes. A primary challenge is managing the trade-off between providing acceptable levels of security and conserving scarce resources, in particular energy, needed for network operations. Many schemes, referred to as static schemes, have adopted the principle of key predistribution with the underlying assumption of a relatively static short-lived network (node replenishments are rare, and keys outlive the network). An emerging class of schemes, dynamic key management schemes, assumes long-lived networks with more frequent addition of new nodes, thus requiring network rekeying for sustained security and survivability. In this article we present a classification of key management schemes in sensor networks delineating their similarities and differences. We also describe a novel dynamic key management scheme, localized combinatorial keying (LOCK), and compare its security and performance with a representative static key management scheme. Finally, we outline future research directions.     

基于分簇的有效无线传感器网络密钥管理方案

针对现有无线传感器网络密钥管理中计算量过大、存储空间过多和网络安全问题,在分簇结构无线传感器网络基础上,提出一种新的密钥管理方案,它通过将已存储的密钥部分地转化为即使被攻击者截获也无影响的特殊信息,来获取更加良好的安全性,同时又不降低网络的连通性。通过仿真与其他算法进行性能对比,结果显示这种方案具有更好的性能。     

簇式传感器网络的可认证动态密钥管理方案

Secure sensor networks has received much attention in the last few years. A sensor network always
works unattended possibly in a hostile environment such as a battlefield. In such environments, sensor networks are subject to node capture. Constrained energy,memory, and computational capabilities of sensor nodes mandate a clever design of security solutions to minimize overhead while maintaining secure communication over the lifespan of the network. In this paper, an authenticated dynamic key management scheme, ADKM has been proposed. It provides efficient, scalable, and survivable dynamic keying in a clustered sensor network with a large number of sensor nodes. ADKM employs a combinatorial exclusion basis system (EBS) for efficiency and one-way hash chains for authentication. Analysis of security and performance demonstrate that ADKM is efficient in security of sensor networks.     

An improved key distribution mechanism for large-scale hierarchical wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are often deployed in hostile environments and operated on an unattended mode. In order to protect the sensitive data and the sensor readings, secret keys should be used to encrypt the exchanged messages between communicating nodes. Due to their expensive energy consumption and hardware requirements, asymmetric key based cryptographies are not suitable for resource-constrained wireless sensors. Several symmetric-key pre-distribution protocols have been investigated recently to establish secure links between sensor nodes, but most of them are not scalable due to their linearly increased communication and key storage overheads. Furthermore, existing protocols cannot provide sufficient security when the number of compromised nodes exceeds a critical value. To address these limitations, we propose an improved key distribution mechanism for large-scale wireless sensor networks. Based on a hierarchical network model and bivariate polynomial-key generation mechanism, our scheme guarantees that two communicating parties can establish a unique pairwise key between them. Compared with existing protocols, our scheme can provide sufficient security no matter how many sensors are compromised. Fixed key storage overhead, full network connectivity, and low communication overhead can also be achieved by the proposed scheme.     

A new hybrid key pre-distribution scheme for wireless sensor networks

This article presents a novel hybrid key pre-distribution scheme based on combinatorial design keys and pair-wise keys. For the presented scheme, the deployment zone is cleft into equal-sized cells. We use the combinatorial design based keys to secure intra-cell communication, which helps to maintain low key storage overhead in the network. For inter-cell communication, each cell maintain multiple associations with all the other cells within communication range and these associations are secured with pair-wise keys. This helps to ensure high resiliency against compromised sensor nodes in the network. We provide in-depth analysis for the presented scheme. We measure the resiliency of the presented scheme by calculating fraction of links effected and fraction of nodes disconnected when adversary compromises some sensor nodes in the network. We find that the presented scheme has high resiliency than majority of existing schemes. Our presented scheme also has low storage overhead than existing schemes.

     

Blockchain-inspired lightweight trust-based system in vehicular networks

A decentralized application runs on the blockchain network without the intervention of a central authority. Transparency in transactions and security in vehicular networks are the issues for central systems. The proposed system uses blockchain-based smart contracts, which eliminate the requirement for any third-party verification. Additionally, with signature verification and reduced overhead, smart contracts also help in a fast and secure transaction. This study suggests a trust-based system paradigm where certificate authority (CA) is employed for vehicle registration. We also propose a blockchain-based system that provides efficient two-way authentication and key agreement through encryption and digital signatures. The analysis of the proposed model reveals that it is an efficient way of establishing distributed trust management, which helps in preserving vehicle privacy. The proposed scheme is tested in Automated Validation of Internet Security-sensitive Protocols (AVISPA), and security parameters verification in Network Simulator 2(NS2) also shows that the proposed scheme is more effective in comparison with existing schemes in terms of authentication cost, storage cost, and overhead.     

A Secure Key Predistribution Scheme for WSN Using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an upcoming research field which is quite different from traditional network security mechanisms. Many applications are dependent on the secure operation of a WSN, and have serious effects if the network is disrupted. Therefore, it is necessary to protect communication between sensor nodes. Key management plays an essential role in achieving security in WSNs. To achieve security, various key predistribution schemes have been proposed in the literature. A secure key management technique in WSN is a real challenging task. In this paper, a novel approach to the above problem by making use of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is presented. In the proposed scheme, a seed key, which is a distinct point in an elliptic curve, is assigned to each sensor node prior to its deployment. The private key ring for each sensor node is generated using the point doubling mathematical operation over the seed key. When two nodes share a common private key, then a link is established between these two nodes. By suitably choosing the value of the prime field and key ring size, the probability of two nodes sharing the same private key could be increased. The performance is evaluated in terms of connectivity and resilience against node capture. The results show that the performance is better for the proposed scheme with ECC compared to the other basic schemes.     

Hexagonal Clustered Trust Based Distributed Group Key Agreement Scheme in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Secure and efficient group communication among mobile nodes is one of the significant aspects in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The group key management (GKM) is a well established cryptographic technique to authorise and to maintain group key in a multicast communication, through secured channels. In a secure group communication, a one-time session key is required to be shared between the participants by using distributed group key agreement (GKA) schemes. Due to the resource constraints of ad hoc networks, the security protocols should be communication efficient with less overhead as possible. The GKM solutions from various researches lacks in considering the mobility features of ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a hexagonal clustered one round distributed group key agreement scheme with trust (HT-DGKA) in a public key infrastructure based MANET environment. The proposed HT-DGKA scheme guarantees an access control with key authentication and secrecy. The performance of HT-DGKA is evaluated by simulation analysis in terms of key agreement time and overhead for different number of nodes. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme guarantees better performance to secure mobile ad hoc network. It is demonstrated that the proposed scheme possesses a maximum of 2250 ms of key agreement time for the higher node velocity of 25 m/s and lower key agreement overhead. Also, the HT-DGKA scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of successful message rate, packet delivery ratio, level of security, computation complexity, number of round, number of exponentiations and number of message sent and received that contribute to the network performance.