A novel hybrid key revocation scheme for wireless sensor networks

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. As sensor nodes are deployed in an open and hostile environment, they are vulnerable to various attacks. It is of critical importance to be able to revoke compromised nodes in order to ensure the confidentiality of data traversing in the network. In this work, we propose a novel key revocation scheme which is a hybrid of centralized and distributed methods. The design of our scheme is based on Chan et al. (2005) but eliminates the requirement of prior knowledge. It mainly consists of a voting procedure among nodes and a global revocation by the base station. We also modify existing distributed revocation properties in Chan et al. (2005)’s protocol and extend them to key revocation properties of any hybrid schemes based on the voting process.