Toward a Lightweight Cryptographic Key Management System in IoT Sensor Networks

Advances in the development of electronic components, particularly microprocessors, have enabled the manufacture of increasingly small and intelligent devices such as wireless sensors. These sensors, among other uses, are networked in a special type of ad hoc network called a wireless sensor network (WSN) and used in a variety of real-world applications, such as environmental monitoring, smart healthcare, or, more generally, where it is desired to be able to monitor a remote environment. Secure communication is an essential element of these types of networks because it requires the implementation of special mechanisms to ensure an acceptable level of security given the limited resources of the network equipment (sensors). In this chapter, we propose a scheme based on the functioning of the A-star algorithm to create paths and thus keys between the nodes of a network. The scheme exploits an algorithm using a cost function based on signal strength and cryptographic resources (cryptographic computations and memory occupied by the keys). The proposed scheme introduces a method of pre-distribution of keys with periodic renewal as well as on-demand renewal while simplifying the key management. Intensive simulations show that the proposed method outperforms the LEAP+ approach by around 13.21% in terms of RAM usage.