Efficient Group Key Management Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are widely used in a variety of commercial and military applications. As a fundamental requirement for providing security functionality in sensor networks, key management plays an essential role in authentication and encryption. In this paper, we propose a Refined Key Link Tree (RKLT) scheme that incorporates dirty key path into the key link tree-based group key management scheme. By delaying key update operations in dirty key paths, the number of duplicate key update messages for auxiliary nodes can be reduced, which also brings down the energy cost. We show through experiments that our RKLT scheme requires fewer rekeying messages than those in the existing group key management schemes.