Sliding-window self-healing key distribution mechanism for WSN

Self-healing group key distribution mechanism based on dual direction hash chain has received extensive attention for its property advantages of high performance in terms of storage, communication and computation complexity. However, it is usually vulnerable to collusive attack from its adversaries. This paper presented a sliding-window self-healing key distribution mechanism for the collusion problem. It used the hash function with a key to form dual directional hash chain. The self-healing key took part in the computing of the corresponding session key. By using a sliding-window, limited the self-healing interval to a certain range, which reduced the exposure of keys and achieved the capability of resisting collusion attack from nodes lying outside the self-healing interval. Correlation analysis and simulation results show that compared with the former works, the key distribution mechanism greatly lower the risk of collusion attack and effectively improves security under the same efficiency le-vel.