WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK SECURITY MECHANISM

Abstract

The salient features of WSN like use of wireless radio communication, collaborative nature and deployment in the open environment exposes it to many security threats. Since WSN has tight limitations on the power consumption, transmission and computation the complex cryptographic algorithms can’t be used to provide the security. Key management in WSN is the fundamental line of defense for a secure communication and thus it is very important. The use of single key for secure communication is not a good idea as if the node gets compromised all the key material will be extracted by the adversary which poses a great threat to the network. Moreover uses of traditional public key cryptography schemes are not suited to the WSN due to the tight constraints on the power, computation and transmission. In this thesis we propose a new framework for enhanced Secure Key management for hierarchical WSN which enhances the security of the network. In our proposed work the base station computes all the keys required for both inter and intra cluster communications. Cluster is further isolated into small geographical areas on the basis of hop count from the cluster head. The sensor nodes in the network join the cluster on the basis of the distance (hop counts) from the cluster head which localizes the path key things and reduces the overhead.