UNLOCKING SECURITY: ALGORITHMS AND PROTOCOLS FOR KEY MANAGEMENT IN WSNS
P. Suma Latha, C. Priya, Nazeer Shaik · 2023
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a crucial role in modern data collection and monitoring applications, but their deployment in challenging environments exposes them to security threats. Secure key management is a fundamental aspect of ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data exchanged within WSNs. This paper presents a comprehensive study of secure key management in WSNs, focusing on algorithms, protocols, challenges, and potential future directions. The paper starts with an introduction to WSNs, highlighting their importance and applications. It then discusses the significance of secure key management, emphasizing the need for confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and key revocation. The challenges in key management are explored, including limited resources, dynamic network topology, scalability, key distribution, and key revocation and update. Various cryptographic techniques used for key management are explained, such as symmetric key cryptography, asymmetric key cryptography, and hash-based techniques. The paper delves into key management protocols, including LEAP, SPINS, TESLA, and LEAP+, comparing their resource utilization, resistance to attacks, scalability, and ease of implementation. A comparative analysis of these protocols reveals their strengths and limitations in different scenarios. Moreover, the paper highlights future directions in secure key management, such as quantum-resistant key management, energy-efficient protocols, and the application of machine learning for optimization and security.By comprehensively addressing secure key management in WSNs, this paper provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners to design robust and efficient key management solutions for their WSN deployments.