KALwEN: A New Practical and Interoperable Key Management Scheme for Body Sensor Networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks(BSNs) pose several challenges -- some inherited from wireless sensor networks(WSNs), some unique to themselves -- that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new lightweight scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports global broadcast, local broadcast and neighbor-to-neighbor unicast, while preserving past key secrecry and future key secrecy. The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case.