A verified group key agreement protocol for resource-constrained sensor networks

Abstract

As a result of the growing popularity of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), secure group communication becomes an important research issue for network security because of the popularity of group-oriented applications in WSNs, such as electronic monitoring and collaborative sensing. The secure group key agreement protocol design is crucial for achieving secure group communications. As we all know, most security technologies are currently deployed in wired networks and are not fully applicable to WSNs involving mobile nodes with limited capability. In 2008, we proposed a Blom's matrix based group key management protocol (BKM) with robust continuity for WSNs. Unfortunately, in this paper we present that the BKM has a security weakness in which participants cannot confirm that their contributions were actually involved in the group key establishment. This is an important property of group key agreement. Therefore, we propose a verified group key agreement protocol (V-BKA) for resource-constrained WSNs. We show that the proposed protocol produces contributory group key agreement. We demonstrate that the proposed protocol is a perfect key management protocol and is well suited for resource- constrained WSNs. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.