RiSeG: a ring based secure group communication protocol for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks

Securing group communication in wireless sensor networks has recently been extensively investigated. Many works have addressed this issue, and they have considered the grouping concept differently. In this paper, we consider a group as being a set of nodes sensing the same data type, and we alternatively propose an efficient secure group communication scheme guaranteeing secure group management and secure group key distribution. The proposed scheme (RiSeG) is based on a logical ring architecture, which permits to alleviate the group controller's task in updating the group key. The proposed scheme also provides backward and forward secrecy, addresses the node compromise attack, and gives a solution to detect and eliminate the compromised nodes. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme is secure, highly efficient, and lightweight. A comparison with the logical key hierarchy is preformed to prove the rekeying process efficiency of RiSeG. Finally, we present the implementation details of RiSeG on top of TelosB sensor nodes to demonstrate its feasibility.