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An Efficient Pairwise and Group Key Management Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

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Abstract

Although security services depend on the key management system, they do not specify how to exchange keys securely. Many security-critical applications depend on key management processes to operate but also demand a high level of fault tolerance when a node is compromised. Due to constraints on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) traditional security mechanisms cannot be applied directly. Moreover, to be robust, the key management protocol should not only be lightweight but also should support both pairwise and group-wise communications. In this paper, we propose an efficient key management protocol for WSNs that provides support for both pairwise and group-wise key management. We have implemented our scheme in the TelosB mote and present some experimental results on computational, communication, energy and storage overheads. We compared the performance with other symmetric and public key based key management protocols used in WSNs. The results show our protocol is efficient in terms of computation, communication and energy overhead. It can update both pairwise and group keys to support key revocation, key refresh and new node addition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada

    Musfiq Rahman

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, NS, Canada

    Srinivas Sampalli

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  1. Musfiq Rahman
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  2. Srinivas Sampalli
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Correspondence to Musfiq Rahman.

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Rahman, M., Sampalli, S. An Efficient Pairwise and Group Key Management Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network. Wireless Pers Commun 84, 2035–2053 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2546-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2546-4

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