An efficient and secure session key management scheme for cluster based wireless sensors networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments, which make such networks highly vulnerable and increase the risk of attacks against this type of network. WSN comprises of large number of sensor nodes with different hardware abilities and functions. Due to the limited memory resources and energy constraints, complex security algorithms cannot be used in sensor networks. Therefore, it is necessary to well balance between the security level and the associated energy consumption overhead to mitigate the security risks. In this paper, we present an Efficient and Secure Session Key Management Scheme for Cluster-Based Wireless Sensors Networks (ESSKM). The proposed technique based on symmetric key mechanism, provides an improved session key establishment by updating periodically the session key within a cluster, hence avoids different type of attacks from malicious nodes and mitigates the node compromise attack. Finally, through the network simulator tool (NS-2), the security analysis and performance simulation demonstrate that ESSKM not only achieves efficient security, but also provides energy saving with low storage overhead. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.