Improving a Forward & Backward Secure Key Management Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Park proposed a forward & backward Secure key management scheme in wireless sensor networks for Process Control Systems (PCSs) or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems [7]. The scheme, however, is still vulnerable to an attack called "sandwich attack": two nodes captured at times $t_1$ and $t_2$, respectively, surrenders all the group keys used between times $t_1$ and $t_2$. In this paper, we propose a fix to the scheme, which can limit the vulnerable time duration to an arbitrarily chosen time span while keeping the forward and backward secrecy of the scheme untouched.