A Hybrid DOS-Tolerant PKC-Based Key Management System for WSNs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid key management system for wireless sensor networks that combines the energy efficiency of symmetric cryptography with the robustness of public key cryptography, addressing security vulnerabilities.

Contribution

It proposes two improved PKC-based key agreement protocols that mitigate denial of service attacks while maintaining energy efficiency and other desirable features.

Findings

Simulation confirms the new protocols effectively prevent DoS attacks.

The hybrid system retains energy efficiency and security features.

Improvements do not significantly increase computational overhead.

Abstract

Security is a critical and vital task in wireless sensor networks, therefore different key management systems have been proposed, many of which are based on symmetric cryptography. Such systems are very energy efficient, but they lack some other desirable characteristics. On the other hand, systems based on public key cryptography have those desirable characteristics, but they consume more energy. Recently based on authenticated messages from base station a new PKC based key agreement protocol was proposed. We show this method is susceptible to a form of denial of service attack where resources of the network can be exhausted with bogus messages. Then, we propose two different improvements to solve this vulnerability. Simulation results show that these new protocols retain desirable characteristics of the basic method and solve its deficiencies.