An Enhanced Misused Key Detection Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the majority of key managements use the random key predistribution mechanism which is based on the probability model. Thus, an adversary can easily get the keys between any two non-compromised nodes by compromising some number of nodes. If an adversary gets the keys, he can modify or insert messages into the communication channels. These kinds of attacks are very critical because an adversary may mislead the operation of the WSNs or the application. Recently, Liu and Dong proposed a method to detect keys which is misused by an adversary. They suggested the additional protection for non-compromised sensor nodes even if an attacker has learned the shared key between them. In this paper, we enhance the misused key detecting mechanism in an efficient and effective way. Our security analysis shows that our method is more effective than the Liu and Dong's method. Additionally, in our simulation result, the energy consumption of our scheme is 30% more efficient than that of the Liu and Dong's scheme on the average.