Key Management Scheme For Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks(WSNs) is a network structure that is formed by a large number oflow-cost, low power micro-sensor nodes, which are able to sense around, process data and performwireless communications in multi-hop, self-organized way. Its low-cost, multi-functional andunrestricted application environment features render its widespread attentions in various fields sinceits inception, especially broad application prospects in the military, monitoring and medical areas.However, with the improvement in technologies and application conditions of the wireless sensornetworks, its security has attracted people’s growing attentions. Key management, as the foundationand core of various security mechanisms, has been one of security research focuses of wireless sensornetworks.This thesis firstly provides an overview on wireless sensor networks and its security, anddescribes the evaluation criterion of key management scheme and their classification in wirelesssensor networks. Then we discuss some typical key management schemes, pay more attentions to keymanagement schemes in hierarchical wireless sensor networks, and summarize their advantages anddisadvantages.This thesis proposes a novel key management scheme aimed at improving the proposed keymanagement schemes in hierarchical wireless sensor networks, which is based on LEKM scheme andcombined with (k, n) threshold secret sharing technology. This scheme will make wireless sensornetworks more resilience against physical capture attacks while ensure the network’s high securityconnectivity rates and low resource cost. In addition, this thesis also proposes corresponding dynamickey management scheme to address node-addition, node-deletion and key-update issues. Thedissertation also analyses this scheme on the special case k=n and introduces its shared-keyestablishment process. As shown in theoretical analysis and experiments, with a lower storage,computation and communication overhead, our scheme achieves high network security and securityconnectivity. It further mitigates the contradictions between resource consumption and networksecurity.