Key Management Scheme for Query Based Routing in Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are emerging technologies that enable various applications including tracking, monitoring and control. Because of ad-hoc, wireless communication and limitation of resources, much vulnerability arises. In false report injection attacks, an attacker tries to confuse a user or deplete energy resource of sensor nodes by injecting false reports through compromised nodes. One of countermeasures to the attacks is the commutative cipher based en-route filtering (CCEF). In CCEF, if a cluster header (CH) is compromised, false reports injected through it always reach the base station (BS).To solve the problem, we propose the key management scheme for query based routing in sensor networks. In the proposed scheme, a CH can not derive the session key without help of its neighbor nodes and let false reports reach the BS. We confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of en-route filtering capability.