الفهرس 
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Wireless ensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small nodes with sensing,
computation, and wireless communications capabilities and it is expected to play an
essential role in upcoming age. WSNs are deployed in many applications relevant
to different areas in life as ecological, and health applications. Due its deployment
in unattended and hostile environments; individual sensors are vulnerable to
security compromise and susceptible to physical capture and are prone to different
types of malicious attacks. For example, an adversary can easily listen to the traffic,
impersonate one of the network nodes, or intentionally provide misleading
information to other nodes.
WSNs pose unique challenges, including low computation capability, small
memory, limited energy resources, and susceptibility to physical capture.
Furthermore, using insecure wireless communications channels makes security
a challenge in these networks. Because of the above mentioned constraints,
traditional security techniques used in traditional networks are inadequate and
cannot be applied directly. So, new ideas for securing WSNs are needed.
When setting up a secure WSN, one of the first requirements is to establish
cryptographic keys for later use, which requires an efficient and robust key
management protocol. The goal of key management is to establish required keys
between sensor nodes to be used to secure communication links upon the
exchanged data. The key management scheme should include the process by which
keys are generated, stored, protected, distributed, used, and destroyed.
Generally key management schemes should achieve some requirements as
connectivity, data confidentiality, node authentication, data integrity, availability,
data freshness. Moreover, in WSNs more requirements should be taken into consideration as well like: reducing of consumed power and communication
overhead, resilience against node capture, resistance against node replication,
revocation, scalability, and survivability.
The inherent properties of sensor networks result in WSNs key management is
a tradeoff between the performance and security. Researchers have proposed
a variety of protocols over several years for this well-studied problem.
In this research, first, comprehensive comparative study among the well known
recent key management schemes in WSNs will be conducted to evaluate and
compare the security strength and performance of these schemes. Second, using
the conclusions of the conducted study, a novel WSNs key management scheme
will be proposed. The proposed key management scheme resolves the security
holes in the studied schemes, and it is suitable to be deployed in the limited
resources WSN as well. Finally, the performance of the proposed novel scheme
will be studied and analyzed in terms of security strength, memory storage and
communication overhead, power consumption, simplicity, and scalability.