A Group Key Management Protocol Based on Weight-Balanced 2-3 Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a secure and efficient group key management protocol for wireless sensor networks using a weight-balanced 2-3 tree structure and MDS code, addressing resource constraints and enhancing security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized group key management protocol based on weight-balanced 2-3 trees and MDS codes, improving security and performance in resource-limited WSNs.

Findings

Higher security compared to existing protocols

Improved performance in key distribution and updates

Reduced computation and communication complexity

Abstract

Multicast in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an attractive mechanism for delivering data to multiple receivers as it saves bandwidth. To guarantee the security of multicast, the group key is used to encrypt and decrypt the packages. However, providing key management services in WSNs is complicated because sensor nodes possess limited resources of computing, storage and communication. To address the balance between security and limited resources, a multicast group key management protocol based on the weight-balanced 2-3 tree is proposed to generate, distribute, and update the group key securely and efficiently. The decentralized group key management method is employed. A weight-balanced 2-3 key tree is formed in every subgroup. Instead of using the conventional symmetric and non-symmetric encryption algorithms, the Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) code technique is used to distribute the multicast key dynamically. During the key updating, a series of adjustment rules are summarized to keep the tree weight-balanced, where pseudo-nodes as leaves are added to reduce the computation and communication complexity. Compared with some other group key management protocols, our scheme shows higher superiority on security and performance.