Research On Key Management Mechanism In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network is composed of the large number of small sensor nodes deployed in the monitoring of the region. And it forms a multi-hop's self-organizing network system through the way of wireless communication. As the bridge of the physical world to the digital world, wireless sensor networks have great use of space. But because of resource constraints of sensor nodes, the now mature security technology is not well applied to wireless sensor networks. Hence, security issue has become a hot research in wireless sensor networks. Key management as the basis for other cryptographic security mechanisms and security, it is significant to study key management issues of WSNs. Major work and its creativity are listed as follows.First, the classification of key management scheme for wireless sensor networks is introduced. Then the the key management program evaluation standards have beeen described. According to its difference of architecture, the existing key management schemes which have divided into the distributed type and layer of cluster type are reviewed.Second, an authentication scheme based on secret sharing for wireless sensor networks is proposed. In order to ensure the reliability of the information collection and transmission, for the new nodes join the network, authentication of their legal identity is the key technology to ensure the network security. Because the insufficiency of node energy, computing and storage ability in wireless sensor networks, as well as the overfull energy consumption of public-key algorithms and digital signatures, an authentication scheme based on secret sharing called EASSS for wireless sensor networks is proposed. The EASSS utilizes secret sharing and symmetric key approach to authenticate the new node which will join the network. In ensuring the security context, and the EASSS scheme has achieved fairly good performance comparing to the related schemes.Third, a group key management scheme based on secret sharing in wireless sensor network is proposed, which is called GKMSSS. GKMSSS uses LEACH protocol to make the network clustering. Based on the use of secret sharing and the principle of symmetric key encryption, the group key components are stored in the various group members in a distributed manner. And combining the entity authentication mechanism based on the secret sharing, the key pre-configured, hierarchical key generation, the network sub-clusters, key generation and distribution, key updates, group of new members joining and members of the group exiting are successfully achieved. Through correlation analysis and experiments, it shows that GKMSSS effectively assures the group communication forward secrecy, backward secrecy, good anti-prisoner capacity of the node and good key rekeying success probability on condition that the storage overhead and communication overhead is in an acceptable situation respectively.