HIKES: Hierarchical key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a hierarchical key establishment scheme called HIKES. The base station in this scheme, acting as the central trust authority, empowers randomly selected sensors to act as local trust authorities authenticating, on its behalf, the cluster members and issuing private keys. HIKES uses a partial key escrow scheme that enables any sensor node selected as a cluster head to generate all the cryptographic keys needed to authenticate other sensors within its cluster. This scheme localizes secret key issuance and reduces the communication cost with the base station. HIKES provides an efficient broadcast authentication in which source authentication is achieved in a single transmission and a good defense for the routing mechanism. HIKES defends the routing mechanism against most known attacks and is robust against node compromise. HIKES also provides high addressing flexibility and network connectivity to all sensors in the network, allowing sensor addition and deletion. Simulation results have shown that HIKES provides an energy‐efficient and scalable solution to the key management problem. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.