ABSTRACT
Due to limited resources and their deployment in unreceptive environments, the communication between the sensor nodes can be effectively secured by symmetric key cryptography. One of the important attacks is the physical node capture where the adversary targets the secret keys stored in the nodes to design more attacks in the network. Thus, how to ensure the secure transmission between the sensor nodes in the presence of potential threats is one of the most important challenge in wireless sensor network security. One of the important ways to establish a secure communication is to provide an attack-resistant key management solution. This paper deals with minimization of this key exposure problem during a node capture attack. The main idea is to combine the key splitting with hashing on predistributed keys of the sensor nodes to enhance the robustness against node capture. To further minimize the key exposure during a node capture, the unused key slices in key ring of the sensor nodes are erased after the link key establishment is over. It is shown that the proposed scheme has enhanced resilience against node capture over the other existing schemes in terms of adversary benefit factor.
