Cluster Based Key Management & Authentication Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the security attacks are due to the compromise of the large part of the network which can cause node damage or disturbance in the data flow. At the time of re-keying process, if the re-key from the sink is not securely transmitted to the compromised node, it will lead to denial of service attack. In this paper, we propose a cluster based key management technique for authentication in wireless sensor networks. Initially, clusters are formed in the network and the cluster heads are selected based on the energy cost, coverage and processing capacity. The sink assigns cluster key to every cluster and an EBS key set to every cluster head. The EBS key set contains the pairwise keys for intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication. The cluster head upon detecting a compromised node in its cluster sends a request to sink to perform re-keying operation. The re-keying process utilizes the hashing function for authentication and nodes are recovered in a secured manner.