ABSTRACT
Recent advances in Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication have led to the proliferation of wireless sensor networks (WSN), which comprise low-cost sensors with limited storage and processing power. WSN have applicability in diverse fields, such as: military, ocean, and wildlife monitoring; earthquake monitoring; safety monitoring in buildings; and in new smart home technology proposed by 4G technologies. However, such networks deviate from legacy-embedded wireless networks in terms of scalability, dynamic nature with regard to the addition or deletion of nodes, and deployment areas. Hence, there is a greater challenge in providing security, by taking such harsh operational requirements into consideration. One such challenge is in key distribution and its management. In addition, the lack of a-priori information about the topology of WSN
makes key management fairly complex. Key distribution provides communication secrecy (confidentiality) and authentication among sensor nodes, and key revocation refers to the task of removing compromised keys from the network. Key distribution can be further divided into symmetric and asymmetric key-distribution protocols.
