SenseKey Tool
Selecting an Optimal Key Distribution Protocol for Homogeneous WSN
1. Introduction
Security through Usability.
A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is public by nature, since its nodes (motes) use wireless communication channels for exchanging messages. Thus, it is indispensable to provide basic security primitives to the motes in order to give a minimal protection to the information flow and a foundation to create secure protocols.
Such security primitives need certain security credentials, i.e. secret keys, in order to work. The task of creating and providing these keys, hence constructing a secure key infrastructure, is done by the Key Management System (KMS). Due to their importance, the KMS have received increasing attention on the scientific literature, spanning many frameworks that deal with the problem of bootstrapping the secret keys of a sensor network.
However, it is difficult for a network designer to choose a certain KMS that is suitable for the requirements of the scenario he/she has to deploy. This SenseKey web application partially solve that problem: Given the requirements of the scenario where the motes are going to be deployed, the tool automatically choose the KMS that would be more suitable for that certain scenario.
Note that this tool manages basically KMS for homogeneous (i.e. non-hierarchical) sensor networks.