A Compromise-Resilient Group Rekeying Scheme for Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are normally operated in unattended, harsh, or hostile environment. The adversaries may easily compromise some sensor nodes and abuse their shared keys to inject false sensing reports or modify the reports sent by other nodes. Many applications in WSNs require secure group communications, which are supported by group keys. Once a malicious node is detected in the group, the group key should be renewed immediately for the network security. Some strategies have been proposed to develop the group rekeying protocol, but most existing schemes suffer the node capture attack. To conquer this problem, we propose a new compromise-resilient group rekeying scheme for hierarchical WSNs in this paper. Compared with existing schemes, our rekeying method possesses the following features: (1) it is robust to the node capture attack, (2) it supports both forward secrecy and backward secrecy, and (3) it has low communication and storage overhead, which are particularly beneficial to the resource-constrained large-scale sensor networks.