Improving Key Negotiation in Transitory Master Key Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have been adopted in different areas of daily life, exposing the network data and the hardware to different security threats. Many key management schemes have been proposed aiming at securing the communications among nodes, for instance the popular LEAP+ protocol. This paper proposes an enhanced variant of the LEAP+ protocol that decreases the key setup time through the reduction of the number of exchanged packets thus improving the security of communications. The results extracted from extensive test sessions obtained by network simulation have been compared to the corresponding data derived from the LEAP+ protocol in order to quantify the improvements.