Research On Key Update Scheme In Wireless Sensor Networks

With the technology development of sensors, low-power electronics and RF, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most active frontier fields related to interdisciplinary studies and advanced technology. The research on WSN has tremendous significance and important scientific value.The sensor nodes just have limited resources, and they are often deployed in harsh or adversary environments. Therefore, the nodes are easily to be captured by attackers. The security problems of wireless sensor networks are widely concerned. Existing work has common problems, such as the isolation of sensor nodes, the waste in key pre-distribution, the leak problem of pre-shared keys, the ignorance or inability of key updating.Aiming to settle the hidden troubles of current key updating technologies for wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes a Code Slice based Key Updated Scheme for WSNs (CSKU). In CSKU, an initial key and some code slices are preloaded on each sensor node. After exchanging code slices with neighbor nodes, any two neighbor nodes can get the same set of code slices. Then the set of code slices can make up a key updating program which can be used to update the pair-wise key. Theoretical analysis shows that CSKU can achieve high security with low computational and communication overhead. Moreover, it can support large scale wireless sensor networks well.In order to solve the problem of the initial key exposure of CSKU, which may cause the failure of the entire network, we also study the key updating problem in the wireless sensor networks formed by random deployment. A new key updating scheme is proposed based on random key pre-distribution for WSNs (Random Key pre-distribution based Key Updated scheme for WSN, which is called RKKU for short). In RKKU, some random keys, a hash function and some code slices are preloaded on each sensor node at random allocation. RKKU compares with the information of some random key to find the same key, and computes the communication key between two sensor nodes with one-way hash function. Compared with other schemes, RKKU has less computational overhead, less communication overhead, lower cost of key updating and high security performance, which is suitable for WSNs.At the end of the paper, we conclude the paper, and then propose the future study of key updating in wireless sensor networks.