A Forward & Backward Secure Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks for PCS/SCADA

Process Control Systems (PCSs) or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have recently been added to the already wide collection of wireless sensor network applications. The PCS/ SCADA environment is somewhat more amenable to the use of heavy cryptographic mechanisms such as public key cryptography than other sensor application environments. The sensor nodes in this environment, however, are still open to devastating attacks such as node capture, which makes the design of secure key management challenging. This chapter introduces an adversary model with which we can assess key management protocols. It also proposes a key management scheme to defeat node capture attack by offering both forward and backward secrecies. The scheme overcomes the pitfalls of a comparative scheme while being not computationally more expensive.