Abstract
Key management is a core mechanism to ensure the
security of applications and network services in wireless sensor
networks. Key management includes two aspects: key distribution
and key revocation. The goal of the key distribution is to establish
the required keys between sensor nodes which must exchange
data. Key revocation is used to remove compromised sensor nodes
from the network. Although many key distribution schemes and
key revocation schemes have been proposed in the literature,
there is a lack of a framework which can integrate the schemes. In
this paper, we propose a key management framework, uKeying,
for wireless sensor networks using a globally distributed session
key. uKeying includes three parts: a security mechanism to
provide secrecy for the communication in the sensor network, an
efficient session key distribution scheme, and a centralized key
revocation scheme. The proposed framework does not depend
on a specific key distribution scheme and can support many key
distribution schemes. We further demonstrate how to use the
framework to support secure group communication protocols in
wireless sensor networks. Our analysis shows that the framework
is secure, efficient, and extensible. The simulation and results
reveal for the first time that a centralized key revocation scheme
can also attain a high efficiency.