Towards enhanced key management in multi-phase ZigBee network architecture

ZigBee is one of impartment wireless technologies now being widely deployed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, ZigBee exhibits several security concerns especially insufficiently addressed key management mechanism. The security of WSNs has a direct reliance on secure and efficient key management. This leaves key management as a fundamental research topic in the field of WSNs security. Among the proposed key management schemes for WSNs security, the localized encryption and authentication protocol (LEAP) has been regarded as an efficient protocol over the last years. LEAP supports the establishment of four types of keys. The security of these keys is under the assumption that the initial deployment phase is secure and the initial key is erased from sensor nodes after the initialization phase. Whilst the initial key is used again for node addition after the initialization phase whereas the new node can be compromised before erasing the key. A time-based key management scheme rethought the security of LEAP. We show the deficiency of the time-based key management scheme and developed an enhanced key management scheme for multi-phase ZigBee architecture in this paper. We show the proposed comprehensive key management solution keeps forward and backward secrecy and suits the application requirements and constraints through analysis and simulation.