Identity and Pairing-Based Secure Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Key management poses a main concern for security operation in sensor network. Most existing key management schemes try to establish shared keys for all pairs of neighbor sensors, no matter whether these nodes communicate with each other or not, and causes large overhead. Recent trend of research mainly consider homogeneous sensor network and a few consider heterogeneous sensor network for key management. In this paper, we consider heterogeneous sensor network (HSN) as a model for our proposed novel key agreement protocol based on pairing identity based encryption (IBE). The proposed scheme reduces the key spaces of the nodes, in fact nodes do not need to store any key of the other nodes rather it computes secret sharing key by using pairing and IBE properties. Security analysis shows, it also robust against different attacks such as replay attack, masquerade attack, and integrity attack.