An Enhanced Efficiency of Key Management Method for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Mobile Agents

Abstract

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Security in wireless sensor networks is very crucial especially whenever they deployed in military applications. Cryptography is used to protect sensitive information from disclosure. Key management is important component in cryptography. Cryptography is not useful if keys are disclosed to attackers. Designing an efficient key management for WSN is a difficult task because of scarcity of computing, communication, and memory resources. An efficient key distribution approach is proposed by using mobile agent paradigm rather than client–server model. The proposed approach will use good features of both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Mobile agents are used to generate public and private key pairs, update keys, and revocation of keys. The proposed scheme in the first level will use mobile agents for key distribution and coordination for asymmetric keys, and in the second level, sensor nodes can involve in constructing symmetric keys for secure communication through mutual authentication and encryption with those keys. The proposed method is implemented using NS2 simulator, and results are compared with existing similar methods in terms of evaluation parameters like communication, computation overhead, memory overhead, and resiliency. The performance of proposed method is improved when it is compared with similar existing methods.