Secure clustering and symmetric key establishment in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Reza Azarderskhsh;Arash Reyhani-Masoleh

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking - Special issue on security and resilience for smart devices and applications
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Information security in infrastructureless wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the most important research challenges. In these networks, sensor nodes are typically sprinkled liberally in the field in order to monitor, gather, disseminate, and provide the sensed data to the command node. Various studies have focused on key establishment schemes in homogeneous WSNs. However, recent research has shown that achieving survivability in WSNs requires a hierarchy and heterogeneous infrastructure. In this paper, to address security issues in the heterogeneous WSNs, we propose a secure clustering scheme along with a deterministic pairwise key management scheme based on public key cryptography. The proposed security mechanism guarantees that any two sensor nodes located in the same cluster and routing path can directly establish a pairwise key without disclosing any information to other nodes. Through security performance evaluation, it is shown that the proposed scheme guarantees node-to-node authentication, high resiliency against node capture, and minimum memory space requirement.