A PUF-Based Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have a variety of applications in commercial, military, medicine and the environment. This type of networks for reasons such as having non-secure communication channel and wireless communications are faced with security challenges. How to manage encryption keys between sensor nodes in the network in order to have maximum security with minimum cost as a basic security approach has always been an interest to researchers in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a new plan for key management in sensor networks with heterogeneous structure is provided. The plan is to use physically unclonable functions as a new method to secure the network against physical attacks and the required storage space compared to other schemes provided for the key pre-distribution is reduced.

Keywords:

wireless sensor network , encryption , physical unclonable functions , key management , WSN , PUF