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compromised by adversaries, the information materials of the sensor is exposed, the
entire network will be threatened (Zhou, et al., 2008). Therefore, wireless network
security management mechanism is particularly important, key management is an
important aspect to provide safe, reliable communications in WSNs security research.
The key distribution and management is prominent in security mechanisms, after
surveying all different key distribution mechanism, we find the clustering hierarchical
architectures algorithm are often used in WSNs application (Katiyar et al., 2010).
Moreover, the method of public key cryptology in network security are the key
management strategy, scholar at home and abroad proposed a variety of the key
management strategy (Bertier et al., 2010; Du et al., 2007; Claveirole et al., 2008; Luk
et al., 2007; Zhu et al., 2006; Eltoweissy et al., 2006). One of the most suitable PKC
primitives for a WSNs is the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) (Bos et al., 2009). There
are some hierarchical architecture distributing key system to protect the communication
in WSNs (Du et al., 2007; Bertier et al., 2010; Claveirole et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2008,
2012a, 2012b; Luk et al., 2007). Bertier et al. (2010) present a low-cost secret sharing
scheme for sensor network, which provides a basic building block to establish secure
communication through exchanging secret keys between neighbour nodes without any
cryptography methods and extends the secret key establishment with authentication.
However, because of the exchange happens among sensor nodes, it costs lots of energy.
Moreover, the authentication between neighbour nodes also needs exchange large of
messages, which makes it not suit for WSNs. Claveirole et al. (2008) introduces secure
data aggregation based on secret sharing and information transfer. Sensor nodes divide
messages into shares and forward them among several disjoint paths to prevent
eavesdropping attack and tampering attack, also designs a secret multi-path aggregation
mechanism which applies secret sharing to create shares to deal with security under the
chance of node compromised. However, these schemes are not feasible for heavy energy
consumption and this is not conducive to the change of nodes in the cluster. On the one
hand, they want to data aggregation using secret sharing, on the other hand, they have to
distribute key things and shares message to confuse the enemy, so that the adversary
cannot find out the real route, which need large of messages exchange. Meanwhile, in
these schemes, the network must exchange many messages to establish key system,
which consumes lots of energy. In this paper, we present a novel key management
scheme based on secret sharing (KMSS). In KMSS, considering about the energy
efficiency is a dominant consideration problem in WSNs, we firstly take advantage of the
maximum energy cluster head (MECH) protocol to clustering. Different from other
hierarchical architecture, MECH protocol restricts the size of cluster to generate uniform
cluster. In each cluster, there is a sensor, called cluster head (in short, CH), which gathers
information from other member nodes in one cluster and transmits the processed
information to the BS. Therefore, to protect the communication channel from CH to BS,
we present a cluster-between key. Firstly, the BS random selects m random polynomial of
degree (t – 1) (m is the number of CH), the constant of polynomial is used to hide session
key between cluster and nodes in the cluster, constant of another polynomial is utilised to
hide session key between BS and CH. According to the property of Lagrange
interpolation formula, the value of that polynomial at t different points are needed in
order to compute the coefficients of the corresponding polynomial of degree (t – 1). Any
less than t pairs of values of polynomial will not recover the polynomial of degree (t – 1).
Simultaneously, we encrypt the coefficients of the polynomial and shares to verify the
polynomial. Also, we introduce a cluster-in key to protect the communication between