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A lightweight key management scheme for wireless sensor networks

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Abstract

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in any real-world application requires a certain level of security. To provide security of operations such as message exchange, key management schemes have to be well adapted to the particularities of WSNs. This paper proposes a novel key management scheme called SKM for sequence-based key management in WSNs. In SKM, sensor nodes are pre-distributed with the first term and the recursive formula of a numerical sequence. This two tiny pre-distributed information will ensure the establishment of pairwise keys to each sensor node with its neighbors after its deployment with a small amount of computation. The security analysis of SKM shows its efficiency. Simulation results confirm that SKM is lightweight in term of node’s resources and has a good resilience against node compromising attacks compared to the main existing schemes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département d’informatique, Faculté des sciences exactes, Université de Bejaia, 06000, Bejaia, Algérie

    Mohamed-Lamine Messai

  2. Université de Lyon, CNRS Université Lyon 1, LIRIS, UMR5205, 69622, Lyon, France

    Mohamed-Lamine Messai & Hamida Seba

  3. Département d’informatique, Faculté des sciences, Université de Sétif 1, Sétif, Algérie

    Makhlouf Aliouat

Authors
  1. Mohamed-Lamine Messai
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  2. Hamida Seba
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  3. Makhlouf Aliouat
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Correspondence to Hamida Seba.

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Messai, ML., Seba, H. & Aliouat, M. A lightweight key management scheme for wireless sensor networks. J Supercomput 71, 4400–4422 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1534-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-015-1534-5

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