A Lightweight and Secure key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have attracted the attention in the last few years because of their wide range of applications including environment monitoring, military combat monitoring, patient monitoring, etc. These applications require the deployment of a number of sensors that work collaboratively to monitor the sensing regions. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints due to the limited resources of sensor nodes that make security the main challenge. Key management are considered to be the core security for WSNs and providing a lightweight solution for resource-constraint devices is becoming a major challenge. In addition, another challenging problem arises is that WSNs are vulnerable to several attacks including node capture attacks where the attacker can compromise the security of the entire network by capturing one or more nodes. In this paper, we propose a secure and lightweight authenticated key management scheme that is based on Elliptic Curve (EC) and Bilinear Pairing (BP). The proposed scheme generates a new pairwise key independently between two sensors after being authenticated. The informal security of the proposed protocol is analyzed and the analysis shows that the scheme can resist a variety of attacks and has better network resilience against node capture attack. In addition, by using BP on EC, the proposed scheme offers improved performance in terms of computational overhead compared to other protocols.