Impersonating-Resilient Dynamic Key Management for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Key management in a large portion of ubiquitous sensor networks has been a challenge due to the limited capabilities of their wireless communicating and battery-powered sensors. Moreover, an attacker physically capturing even a few nodes hampers the entire network security by impersonating nodes to inject false data in an undetected manner. To efficiently protect from such impersonating by node capture, we propose a new dynamic key management framework particularly for large-scale clustered sensor networks. In the framework, different keying mechanisms, respectively, secure in-cluster, intercluster, and individual communication by refreshing keys on demand, while adaptively handling node addition and capture. Theoretic analysis and simulation results show that our proposed framework provides higher connectivity and security against impersonating than other existing studies do, for better trade-off with resource overheads.