Implementation and Performance Analysis for Key Divergent and Evolution Protocols in Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of many sensor motes that are resource-constrained tiny devices, usually driven by battery. It is critical to save the energy consumption, which is mainly due to the communication overheads, in order to extend the life-span of WSN. Key management protocol is an important component to support secure communications in WSN. Two very efficient protocols appeared in the literature: the “Key Divergent Protocol” (KDP) designed by Ren et al. and the “Key Evolution Protocol” (KEP) designed by Klonowski et al. The KEP is an improvement on the KDP to provide forward security by using a cryptographic hash function rather than flipping a random bit in the process of key update, at the expense of a bit higher computational cost. These two protocols are designed specifically for the WSN environment, without incurring additional communication overheads for establishing a secret key between any pair of sensor nodes. In this paper, we present the implementation and performance analysis results that we have conducted on the KDP and KEP. We demonstrate their feasibility in the real WSN testbed and provide the APIs that are ready for integration into WSN applications.