Effective Key Management in Dynamic Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract — Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for a wide variety of applications, including military sensing and tracking, patient status monitoring, traffic flow monitoring, where sensory devices often move between different locations. Securing data and communications requires suitable encryption key protocols. In this paper, we propose a certificateless-effective key management (CL-EKM) protocol for secure communication in dynamic WSNs characterized by node mobility. The CL-EKM supports efficient key updates when a node leaves or joins a cluster and ensures forward and backward key secrecy. The protocol also supports efficient key revocation for compromised nodes and minimizes the impact of a node compromise on the security of other communication links. A security analysis of our scheme shows that our protocol is effec-tive in defending against various attacks. We implement CL-EKM in Contiki OS and simulate it using Cooja simulator to assess its time, energy, communication, and memory performance. Index Terms — Wireless sensor networks, certificateless public key cryptography, key management scheme. I