uKeying: A Key Management Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks Utilizing a Unique Session Key

Key management is a core mechanism to ensure the security of applications and network services in wireless sensor networks. Key management includes two aspects: key distribution and key revocation. The goal of the key distribution is to establish the required keys between sensor nodes which must exchange data. Key revocation is used to remove compromised sensor nodes from the network. Although many key distribution schemes and key revocation schemes have been proposed in the literature, there is a lack of a framework which can integrate the schemes. In this paper, we propose a key management framework, uKeying, for wireless sensor networks using a globally distributed session key. uKeying includes three parts: a security mechanism to provide secrecy for the communication in the sensor network, an efficient session key distribution scheme, and a centralized key revocation scheme. The proposed framework does not depend on a specific key distribution scheme and can support many key distribution schemes. We further demonstrate how to use the framework to support secure group communication protocols in wireless sensor networks. Our analysis shows that the framework is secure, efficient, and extensible. The simulation and results reveal for the first time that a centralized key revocation scheme can also attain a high efficiency.