An Efficient Sensor-to-Sensor Authenticated Path-Key Establishment Scheme for Secure Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Path-key establishment has become accepted as a commonly used solution in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for protecting node-to-node communications from malicious attacks. Unfortunately, traditional security approaches are not well suited to WSNs due to their limited computational/communication abilities and memory, and their vulnerable-to-attack structure. Moreover, to extend lifetime and usability of sensor networks, power conservation and scalability are required in the design of sensor network schemes. In this paper, we propose an efficient sensor-to-sensor authenticated path-key establishment (ES2S-APKE) scheme for wireless sensor networks. ES2S-APKE accomplishes node authentication and pairwise key establishment by applying well-known Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and using cluster-based sensor groups. In clustered sensor networks, a back-end system creates a view of the credential authority (CA) and provides credential update service for all involved nodes in the network, including sink nodes and sensor nodes. A ticket scheme is introduced to provide efficient S2S path-key establishment service. Finally, the security and performance of our proposed ES2S-APKE is compared with Lee’s [19] and Varadharajan’s [32] schemes.