An Efficient and Scalable Key Management Protocol for Secure Group Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

To support secure group communications in resource-constrained wireless sensor networks, we propose an efficient and scalable key management protocol which only uses symmetric cryptographic algorithms and low cost operations. Our protocol can achieve current, forward and backward secrecy. Furthermore, for scalability, the communication and computation cost for master key renewing can be confined to the affected cluster. Our protocol provides better efficiency and is more suitable than the previous master key management protocols for wireless sensor networks.