Pairing-Based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Key management is challenging in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most existing key management schemes mainly consider using symmetric cryptosystems in homogeneous sensor network, but they often do not provide a satisfied storage performance and cause large overhead in establishing shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors. In this paper, we propose a key management scheme using for heterogeneous sensor networks (HSNs). Our scheme is based on pairing-based cryptography and has four types of keys according to networks security needs. The scheme reduces the communication cost and key storage spaces of nodes. In fact sensor nodes can agree shared keys without any interaction and no need to store any keys of the other nodes before deployed. Analysis and simulation indicate that the scheme is efficient, and it enables authentication, and robust against different attacks such as replay attack, masquerade attack, Sybil attack etc.