Key Management Scheme for Sensor Networks with Proactive Key Revocation and Sleep State Consideration

In dynamic key management systems, while frequent control messaging may be necessary for robustness of security, it is detrimental to energy resources of wireless sensor networks. The problem is further exacerbated for sleep enabled sensor networks as a) malicious nodes penetrate into a network by spoofing the IDs of legitimate nodes that are in sleeping state b) it is possible for legitimate sensor nodes to be entirely compromised. In this paper, the above mentioned aspects of keying are addressed as tierce to optimize communication. First a secure key generation mechanism is presented that aims at optimizing communication. Second, a sleep schedule cognizant protocol is presented to prevent ID spoofing of sleeping nodes. Third, a post attack mechanism is proposed to prevent the compromised nodes to join the network. Our threesome solution not only saves energy by minimizing the communication overhead in establishing keys among sensor nodes but also provides high but secure connectivity for sleep state nodes.