TABLE OF CONTENTS Yixin Jiang and Chuang Lin
Department of Computer Science, Tstinghua University
Beijing, China
E-mail: {yxjiang,clin}@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn
Minghui Shi and Xuemin (Sherman) Shen
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo
200 University Ave. West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
E-mail: {mshi,xshen}@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca
A novel key distribution scheme with time-limited node revocation is proposed for secure group communications in wireless sensor networks. The salient security properties offered in the proposed scheme includes seal-healing re-keying message distribution, which features periodic one-way re-keying with efficient tolerance for the lost re-keying messages; and the time-limited dynamic node attachment and detachment, in which the forward and backward secrecy is assured by the hash binary tree. The performance analysis shows that both communication and computation overhead is light-weight. The simulation results also demonstrate the robust performance under poor communication channel quality and frequently dynamic group node topology changes.
Applications of wireless sensor networks recently have attracted great attention from both academia and industry. Secure group communication is increasingly used as an efficient communication way for group-oriented applications in wireless sensor networks, such as mobile bots sent out for different application profiles in battle field. Given the open nature of broadcast channel, the combination of group communication and wireless sensor networks is more susceptible to unauthorized access. Thus, it is required to provide confidentiality in group communications so that non-legitimate nodes are prevented from having access to the secret contents, whereas legitimate nodes could decrypt the data, which are broadcasted to the entire network. To address these...
