On the Performance of a Secure Storage Mechanism for Key Distribution Architectures in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) demands efficient key management schemes. In particular, one of the main research challenges is to ensure secure key storage by sensors due to their constrained resources and high exposure to tampering attempts. To address this issue, we have proposed SENSORLock, a secure key storage mechanism which can be applied to different key distribution architectures for WSNs. In this work, we evaluate SENSORLock through different study cases considering three key distribution architectures: TinySec, SPINS, and NCD. Our goal is to demonstrate its feasibility in large-scale sensor networks. Simulation results indicate that our mechanism introduces an average overhead of 1.9% in terms of end to end delay and provides a similar estimated power consumption compared to the aforementioned architectures. Hence, we argue that it is feasible to use SENSORLock (i) in large-scale sensor networks and (ii) under different key distribution schemes.