S2RP: a Secure and Scalable Rekeying Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, small, low-cost sensor nodes are being widely used to build self-organizing, large-scale, wireless networks for various applications, such as environmental surveillance, health monitoring and so on. Given its unique features, protecting a wireless sensor network is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we present S²RP, a secure and scalable rekeying protocol for sensor networks. S²RP aims at a trade-off between security and resource consumption while it guarantees an authentic distribution of keys that preserves both forward and backward security. The proposed protocol is efficient in terms of communication overhead as it reduces the number and the size of rekeying messages. It is efficient in terms of computation overhead as it guarantees the necessary level of confidentiality and authenticity of rekeying messages by only using symmetric ciphers and one-way hash functions. It follows that S² RP meets the reduced capabilities of sensor nodes, results scalable, and particularly attractive for large and/or highly dynamic groups