sensor network technology, can detect biological and chemical weapons [1]. Some of the civil applications are habitat monitoring, traffic monitoring, object ...
A Secure and Energy-Efficient Key Generation* Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks Murat Al1, Kenji Yoshigoe2 Department of Applied Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, U.S.A. 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR, U.S.A. 1
Abstract- This paper enhances the data confidentiality and energy saving of an existing solution. Our approach utilizes encrypted message as a key generator (KG) for the next message. Thus, a KG that used to be exposed is now encrypted. A masking policy is incorporated to an encryption technique to further improve the data confidentiality. Furthermore, the proposed method no longer requires a transmission of extra information in a form of KGs reducing energy consumption incurred by data transmission. Analysis shows that the proposed method significantly increases encryption strength and minimizes the damage area from the entire network down to a single node. At the same time, our method reduces the traffic volume, excluding network protocol headers, down to 50%. Thus, our solution is ideal for extending the lifespan of a WSN while providing a solid security level. Keywords: WSN, key generation, energy efficiency, confidentiality.
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Introduction
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in both military and civil applications to monitor physical or environmental conditions including magnetism, temperature, sound, motion, vibration, pressure, and chemical elements. For instance, military surveillance applications, which in fact motivated the development of sensor network technology, can detect biological and chemical weapons [1]. Some of the civil applications are habitat monitoring, traffic monitoring, object tracking, and fire detection. A secure communication among sensor nodes is essential for many of these applications especially if sensitive information is exchanged in the network.
* This material is based in part, upon work supported by the National Science Foundation, under Grants nos. CNS-0619069 and EPS-0701890. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Various solutions on secure data transmission in sensor networks are discussed in literatures [2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10]. A list of 18 different key establishment techniques is provided in [2]. These key management protocols are categorized as pre-deployed, arbitrated, and self-enforcing autonomous keying protocols. Kerberos, Otway-Rees, (Elected) Simple Key Distribution Center and BurmesterDesmedt Conference Keying are among the analyzed protocols. The paper compares these protocols based on the size of the exchanged messages as well as the computational resources required for key calculation on a number of different microprocessors. A key management scheme consisting of key predistribution, shared-key discovery, and path-key establishment is proposed in [3]. Due to the memory constraints of sensor nodes each node is not capable of storing a large number of keys. Thus, every node is assigned a randomly chosen set of m keys out of a large pool of P keys where m
