HSKAS: A novel hierarchical shared key authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often deployed in hostile environments, thus being subjected to great security risks. However, due to the influence of environment and dynamic topology, the communication radiuses of all nodes are no strictly consistent, which may cause different neighbor number and redundant neighbors for one central node. In this paper, we present a key agreement scheme without the trusted third parties by exploiting the special characteristics of Hopfield neural network: the two nodes converge in a steady state from their respective initial states after iterating finite times, while maintaining the confidentiality of the key by quantifying the key to strings. Compared to existing solution, the proposed method requires less memory and has lower communication overhead to key agreement.