Dynamic key management in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have a vast field of applications, including environment monitoring, battlefield surveillance and target tracking systems. As WSNs are usually deployed in remote or even hostile environments and sensor nodes are prone to node compromise attacks, the adoption of dynamic key management is extremely important. However, the resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes hinders the use of dynamic key management solutions designed for wired and ad hoc networks. Hence, many dynamic key management schemes have been proposed for WSNs recently. This paper investigates the special requirements of dynamic key management in sensor network environments, and introduces several basic evaluation metrics. In this work, the state of the art dynamic key management schemes are classified into different groups and summarized based on the evaluation metrics. Finally, several possible future research directions for dynamic key management are provided.