CSIT Analysis of Key Management Schemes for Centralized and Distributed Key Revocation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have been utilized for a variety of applications. Such as monitoring environments, military functions, and patient status monitoring. A major challenge in different applications of WSNs is security. This is because they are mostly deployed in a hostile environment, coupled with their constrained resources. Securing data and communication in WSNs requires appropriate cryptographic techniques. This is usually implemented through secure and efficient key management schemes. Research on key management in WSN is a work in progress. In this context, most research works focus on the key establishment and distribution aspect of the key management system. While less attention is devoted to key revocation and renewal techniques. For this reason, network and protocol designers encounter challenges in the design and implementation of the most appropriate schemes for WSN applications. This research work presents an exhaustive review of categories of key revocation schemes in existence. The study focuses on centralized and distributed categories only. A comparative analysis of the security and performance requirements of some selected candidates of centralized and distributed schemes was carried out. The results show that the KRRP scheme is the only solution among the selected candidates that can guarantee end-to-end data secrecy. This is because it merges the capability of private and public key cryptography in its implementation as shown in table 1. Also, the study observed most distributed schemes reviewed did not present energy overheads of process execution despite their complex nature. On the whole, this work outlines a much wider view of key management systems in terms of key revocation functionality and open research issues for the secure and efficient key management system.