Research On Key Management Scheme For Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of low-cost, low-power tiny sensor nodes that can communicate with each other to perform sensing and data processing cooperatively in ad-hoc manner. WSN is regarded as one of the most influential technology in 21 century. To achieve the communication security in sensor network, it's vital to establish secure channel between sensor nodes. Due to the resource constraints of sensor nodes, many traditional key distribution schemes are infeasible for WSN.This thesis gives a summary of the history and applications of WSN. Then, the architecture and the characteristics of WSN are covered. The paper lists the technical difficulties and challenges of sensor network. More specially, the thesis discusses the security demand of WSN and enumerates security threats to WSN and some possible defense measures. The paper also analyzes the challenges to the key management scheme in the WSN and describes the metrics of it.The thesis especially introduces two kinds of key management models for WSN, i.e. those based on the key distribution center (KDC) and those based on key pre-distribution. Then, particularly analyzes and compares the previously-proposed random key pre-distribution schemes in terms of the connectivity, resilience against of node capture and the max network size. At the same time, indicates their merits, weaknesses and the suitable scenarios.Based on the above analysis, the thesis proposes a novel random key pre-distribution scheme based on group-based deployment and hash function. In this scheme, the hash values of keys in key pool are distributed to each node. The security of this scheme is greatly optimized by the security of hash function and the group-based deployment, and in addition, the connectivity is increased. The result of analysis and simulation dedicates that the resilience of node capture of this scheme is improved obviously.