Publisher's Synopsis
Distributed Sensor Networks (DSNs) are ad-hoc mobile networks that include sensor nodes with limited computation and communication capabilities. DSNs are dynamic in the sense that they allow addition and deletion of sensor nodes after deployment to grow the network or replace failing and unreliable nodes. However, DSNs differ from the traditional embedded wireless networks in several important areas, namely: their scale is orders of magnitude larger than that of embedded wireless networks (e.g., tens of thousands as opposed to just tens of sensor nodes); they are dynamic in the sense that they allow addition and deletion of sensor nodes after deployment to extend the network or replace failing and unreliable nodes without physical contact; and they may be deployed in hostile areas where communication is monitored and sensor nodes are subject to capture and manipulation by an adversary. These challenging operational requirements place equally challenging security constraints on DSN design. DSNs may be deployed in hostile areas where communication is monitored and nodes are subject to capture and surreptitious use by an adversary. Hence DSNs require cryptographic protection of communications, sensorcapture detection, key revocation and sensor disabling. These are used in varied applications such as monitoring environmental conditions, military and other industrial purposes. The nodes which are distributed spatially have to communicate with each other in a secured manner since the data associated with these nodes may be confidential. Efficient cryptography techniques are to be used for communication among the nodes. These sensors tend to move in any direction making the key distribution more complex. So the control station which actually monitor the network has to have the idea of where each sensor is and with what other sensors it has to share keys in order to have secure communication. Most key management schemes either deal with networks which have completely static sensors or networks which have partial static and partial mobile. In this Book, we present a key-management scheme designed to satisfy both operational and security requirements of DSNs. The scheme includes selective distribution and revocation of keys to sensor nodes as well as node re-keying without substantial computation and communication capabilities. It relies on probabilistic key sharing among the nodes of a random graph and uses simple protocols for shared-key discovery and path-key establishment, and for key revocation, re-keying, and incremental addition of nodes. The security and network connectivity characteristics supported by the key-management scheme are discussed and simulation experiments presented. DSNs have gained numerous applications such as monitoring, target tracking, and military fields for data gathering and processing. Therefore, a lightweight and efficient key management scheme should be used to solve all these problems mentioned above.
