Mutual Authentication Mechanism for Secure Group Communications in Sensor Network

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recently, a lot of interest is increased in sensor network which gathers various data through many sensor nodes deployed in wired and wireless network environment. However, because of the limitation in memory, computation, and energy of the sensor nodes, security problem is very important issue. In sensor network, not only the security problem, but also computing power should be seriously considered.In this paper, considering these characteristics, we make the sensor network consist of normal sensor nodes and clusterheaders with enough space and computing power, and propose a group key rekeying scheme adopting PCGR(Predistribution and local Collaboration- based Group Rekeying) for secure group communication. In our proposal, we enhance the security by minimizing the risk to safety of the entire network through verifying the new key value from clusterheader by sensor nodes. That is, to update the group keys, clusterheaders confirm sensor nodes through verifying the information from sensor nodes and send the new group keys back to authentic member nodes. The group keys sent back by the clusterheaders are verified again by sensor nodes. Through this mutual authentication, we can check if clusterheaders are compromised or not. Qualnet simulation result shows that our scheme not only guarantees secure group key rekeying but also decreasesstorage and communication overhead.Keywords:Sensor Network, Security, Group Key, Mutual Authentication