• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.870-878
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• 2008

The level of security of most sensor nodes that comprise the sensor networks is low, but because of the low computing power and small storage capacity, it is even very difficult to apply a security algorithm efficiently to the sensor nodes. Therefore, preventing the join of an illegal node to a sensor network is impossible, and the transmitting information is easily exposed and overheard when the transmitting algorithm of the sensor node is hewn. In this paper, we propose a group key management scheme for the sensor network using polar coordinates, so that the sensor nodes can deliver information securely inside a cluster and any illegal node is prevented from joining to the cluster where a sensor network is composed of many clusters. In the proposed scheme, all of the sensor nodes in a cluster set up the authentication keys based on the pivot value provided by the CH. The intensive simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the pair-wise scheme in terms of the secure key management and the prevention of the illegal nodes joining to the network.