Towards a Key Pre-Distribution Scheme to Secure Emergency Sensor Networks
Rachid Haji, Abderrahim Hasbi, Abdelilah Maach · International Review on Computers and Software (IRECOS) · 2016
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are known to be vulnerable to attacks and hard to protect due to their specific characteristics such as resource constraints and wireless infrastructure. Moreover, the transmitted information becomes more sensitive and vulnerable in critical scenarios such as emergency situations which require high confidentiality levels. For this purpose, the cryptography approach becomes compulsory since it enhances the security of data processing and transmitting against advanced and persistent threats including sniffing, traffic analysis and eavesdropping attacks by malicious nodes. The main process of cryptography is key management which generates, exchanges, uses, stores, replaces, protects, and destroys cryptographic keys. In this paper, we propose a key pre-distribution scheme to secure emergency sensor networks based on a hierarchical architecture. Its objective is to deal with large-scale wireless sensor networks while minimizing the overhead of processing, communication, and storage during the key management process. Our comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme offers strong resiliency against a compromised cluster-head or single node and has more simplicity and robustness.