An authentication and key management scheme for heterogeneous sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless sensor networks have attracted the attention of research comunity due to its numerous applications especially in mobility scenarios. However it also increases the security threats against confidentiality, integrity and privacy of the information as well as against their connectivity. Hence a proper key management scheme needs to be proposed to secure both information and connectivity as well as provide better authentication in mobility enabled applications. In this paper, we present an authentication and key management scheme supporting node mobility in a heterogeneous sensor networks that consists of several low capabilities sensor nodes and few high capabilities sensor nodes. We analyze our proposed solution agaist a well know attacks (sybil attacks) to show that it has good resilience against attacks compared to some existing schemes. We also propose two levels of secure authentication methods for the mobile sensor nodes for secure authentication and key establishment.