Key updating methods for combinatorial design based key management schemes

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has become one of the most promising network technologies for many useful applications. However, for the lack of resources, it is different but important to ensure the security of the WSNs. Key management is a corner stone on which to build secure WSNs for it has a fundamental role in confidentiality, authentication, and so on. Combinatorial design theory has been used to generate good-designed key rings for each sensor node in WSNs. A large number of combinatorial design based key management schemes have been proposed but none of them have taken key updating into consideration. In this paper, we point out the essence of key updating for the unital design based key management scheme and propose two key updating methods; then, we conduct performance analysis on the two methods from three aspects; at last, we generalize the two methods to other combinatorial design based key management schemes and enhance the second method. © 2014 Chonghuan Xu and Weinan Liu.