A light-weighted misused key detection in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes are generally distributed in hostile environments so the security services such as confidentiality, authentication and integrity are very important. The basis of these security services is the key management. The majority of key managements use the random key pre-distribution mechanism based on the probability model. Thus, an adversary can easily get the keys between any two non-compromised nodes by compromising some number of nodes. If the adversary gets the keys, he can modify or insert messages into the communication channels. These kinds of attacks are very critical because the adversary may mislead the operation of the networks or the application. Recently, Liu and Dong proposed a method to detect the keys which is misused by an adversary. They suggested the additional protection for non-compromised sensor nodes even if an attacker has learned the shared key between them. To detect a misused key, the traffic overhead is inevitable but their method has some inefficient aspects by performing a unidirectional misused key detection and generating unnecessary traffic. In this paper, we enhance the misused key detecting mechanism by detecting a misused key bidirectionally and removing the unnecessary traffic while the security functionality of the Liu and Dong's scheme is preserved. Our simulation shows that the energy consumption of our scheme is 36% more efficient than that of the Liu and Dong's scheme on average. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.