A novel and low-energy PKC-based key agreement protocol for WSNs

Abstract

Security is a critical and vital task in WSNs. Recently, key management as the core of a secure communication has received lots of attention, but in most of the proposed methods security has been compromised in favor of reducing energy consumption. Consequently, perfect resiliency has not been achieved by most of the previous works. Hostile environment, ability of adversary to capture the nodes, and dead nodes with sensitive data scattered in the region, calls for a more secure and yet practical method. This paper proposes a novel authentication scheme based on broadcast messages from BS to improve security of key management system. Through simulation it is shown that energy consumption of the proposed method, as the most valuable resource in a WSN, is the least among the other existing practical PKC-based key managements. Furthermore, it is shown besides supporting the largest network, the proposed method is very flexible and can provide many different tradeoffs to support wide range of applications. Another problem with WSN network is dead nodes and the cryptographic data stored in them. In the proposed method, it is argued that these data have lost their validity, and therefore are of no value for the adversary.