An Efficient Key Distribution Scheme to Secure Data-Centric Routing Protocols in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

AbstractThis paper deals with an efficient key distribution scheme which is useful to secure data-centric routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks. Similar to these routing protocols, the proposed scheme bootstraps secure key distribution with a centralized process which gives a multi-level hierarchical organization to WSNs. The originality of this work is to permit to use local key distribution process to establish Group Key and Pairwise Key. These two types of keys are useful to secure respectively data request diffusion and data forwarding through multi-hop routing paths. Moreover, when the WSN topology changes, the proposed scheme allows secure WSN reorganization. Security analysis explains that our proposed scheme can withstand several possible attacks against WSNs. A comparison to other solutions based on one KDC shows that the proposed scheme is significantly more efficient and scalable. This is well verified through simulations with TOSSIM under TinyOS using NesC languag