TY - JOUR
T1 - Scalable and efficient key management for heterogeneous sensor networks
AU - Kausar, Firdous
AU - Hussain, Sajid
AU - Yang, Laurence T.
AU - Masood, Ashraf
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This work is in part supported by Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan’s International Research Support Initiative Program’s scholarship given to Firdous Kausar to conduct her research at Acadia University, Canada. Further, we would like to thank National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada for their support in providing RTI and Discovery grants to Dr. Hussain at Acadia University, Canada.
PY - 2008/7
Y1 - 2008/7
N2 - As typical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have resource limitations, predistribution of secret keys is possibly the most practical approach for secure network communications. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme based on random key predistribution for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HSNs). As large-scale homogeneous networks suffer from high costs of communication, computation, and storage requirements, the HSNs are preferred because they provide better performance and security solutions for scalable applications in dynamic environments. We consider hierarchical HSN consisting of a small number high-end sensors and a large number of low-end sensors. To address storage overhead problem in the constraint sensor nodes, we incorporate a key generation process, where instead of generating a large pool of random keys, a key pool is represented by a small number of generation keys. For a given generation key and a publicly known seed value, a keyed-hash function generates a key chain; these key chains collectively make a key pool. As dynamic network topology is native to WSNs, the proposed scheme allows dynamic addition and removal of nodes. This paper also reports the implementation and the performance of the proposed scheme on Crossbow's MicaZ motes running TinyOS. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can be applied efficiently in resource-constrained sensor networks. We evaluate the computation and storage costs of two keyed-hash algorithms for key chain generation, HMAC-SHA1 and HMAC-MD5.
AB - As typical wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have resource limitations, predistribution of secret keys is possibly the most practical approach for secure network communications. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme based on random key predistribution for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HSNs). As large-scale homogeneous networks suffer from high costs of communication, computation, and storage requirements, the HSNs are preferred because they provide better performance and security solutions for scalable applications in dynamic environments. We consider hierarchical HSN consisting of a small number high-end sensors and a large number of low-end sensors. To address storage overhead problem in the constraint sensor nodes, we incorporate a key generation process, where instead of generating a large pool of random keys, a key pool is represented by a small number of generation keys. For a given generation key and a publicly known seed value, a keyed-hash function generates a key chain; these key chains collectively make a key pool. As dynamic network topology is native to WSNs, the proposed scheme allows dynamic addition and removal of nodes. This paper also reports the implementation and the performance of the proposed scheme on Crossbow's MicaZ motes running TinyOS. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can be applied efficiently in resource-constrained sensor networks. We evaluate the computation and storage costs of two keyed-hash algorithms for key chain generation, HMAC-SHA1 and HMAC-MD5.
KW - Authentication
KW - Heterogeneous sensor networks
KW - Key management
KW - Random key predistribution
KW - Security
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U2 - 10.1007/s11227-008-0184-2
DO - 10.1007/s11227-008-0184-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:45849089959
SN - 0920-8542
VL - 45
SP - 44
EP - 65
JO - Journal of Supercomputing
JF - Journal of Supercomputing
IS - 1
ER -