A hierarchical shared key algorithm 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 not strictly consistent, which may cause different neighbor numbers and redundant neighbors for each 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 initial states respectively after iterating finite times, while maintaining the confidentiality of the key by quantifying the key to strings. Compared to existing solutions, the proposed method requires less memory and has lower communication overheads to key agreement.