Secured communication key establishment for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

The resource-constraint nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has caused the security one of biggest challenges. An efficient key management scheme is the pre-requisite to ensure security in WSN. In this paper the authors present two versions of a secured key management scheme adopted on cluster-based topology of sensor network. The proposed schemes use partial key pre-distribution and symmetric cryptography techniques, and shows high resilience to different security attacks. Whereas one version of the proposed protocol uses shared partial keys in a cluster, the other version uses private partial keys. Both versions of the proposed key management scheme outperform other random key pre- distribution protocols in the sense that it requires lower space, lower communication overhead and offers very high session key candidates.