Key management technique for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Advancements in wireless networking and embedded systems technology have given rise to Wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSNs promise ubiquitous data collection and processing for variety of commercial and military applications. Recently proposed Internet of things concept utilises WSN as a medium connecting physical world to virtual world. Practical realization of these applications is possible only after assuring network security. Cryptographic key distribution is a critical stage in the implementation of network security. In WSNs, due to the resource constrained nature of the nodes, it is important to design a key management protocol with minimum resource overhead. At the same time, to meet increasing security demands resource consuming asymmetric key primitives based implementations are needed. In order to address the same, hybrid key management technique is proposed. Both symmetric and asymmetric key distribution techniques are compared with the proposed scheme and also a detailed security analysis is presented.