A Secure Key Management Scheme for Smart Homes

Growing trend in the establishment of smart homes calls for effective, reliable, and secure communication protocols. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), as the main enabling technology for a smart home, requires intercommunication of several household appliances (such as environmental sensors). However, efficient secret key management (in terms of network connectivity, scalability and resiliency against node capture) for sensor-based smart homes still remains a challenge. As researchers usually consider the architecture of smart homes/buildings to be hierarchical, it turns out that hierarchical key management is the best fit for sensor-based smart homes. However, most of the existing hierarchical key management schemes in the literature impose high computational and communication overhead and demand high capacity memories. In this paper, with the goal of providing higher network connectivity and scalability while decreasing memory overhead, we propose a new hierarchical key pre-distribution scheme based on "Combinatorial Design". Moreover, this study is focused on presenting a new key management scheme using symmetric design for WSNs. Symmetric Balanced Incomplete Block Design is used to generate the keys allocated by the base station to the cluster head, and it distributes keys to its members. The proposed scheme is designed to minimize storage overhead and memory consumption while increasing network connectivity.

Keywords:

hierarchical wireless sensor networks , security , smart homes , symmetric design , key management