A combined key management scheme in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have such obvious characteristics as energy-constraint and dynamic topology. Therefore, key management mechanism in wireless sensor networks need to solve confidentiality, integrity and endpoint authentication and the problem of storing a lot of key information in limited space. The current studies can not solve these issues that a large number of key could not be stored because of limited storage space in sensor nodes and a large number of sensor nodes could not exchange their information because they have no share key information with their adjacent nodes. Aimed at these limitations aforementioned, a combined key (CK) management scheme in wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper, which adopts the seed key mapping technology that combines a few key factors into a large number of difference keys in order to solve limited storage space in sensor nodes and uses elliptic curve public key cryptography and designs a public key corresponding to the same two private keys that are encryption key and decryption key respectively used in communication between two sensor nodes and in mutual authentication in order to share key information between adjacent nodes and to make up for deficiencies of no certification center in sensor networks. Performance analysis proves that the CK management scheme has the advantages of in security, storage performance, and energy consumption.