Analysis of security and key management schemes for authenticated broadcast in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The security in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a critical issue due to the inherent limitations of computational capacity, storage capacity and power usage. Packets are dropped or discarded completely, or selectively forwarded by an anonymous party. Also the network is flooded with global suspicious broadcasts. These kinds of attacks may be avoided when using multi path and authenticated broadcasts, which has to be facilitated by the underlying key management architecture. Key management only makes sure the communicating nodes possess the necessary keys, at the same time providing the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of the communicated data. The proposed work, made an effort to survey the well-known security issues in WSNs and study the various asymmetric key or public key algorithms which are used for key distribution as well as encryption/decryption in sensor network for authenticated message broad cast. Based on the analysis, proposed a new method which will improves the performance of an existing RSA algorithm by using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) algorithm for decryption phase. Also it offers countermeasures for the attacks in the network layer of WSN. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.