In wireless sensor networks, the clustering routing protocol is commonly used for energy efficiency. However, routing protocols without proper security suffer from many security vulnerabilities. Hence, a key renewal scheme based on the clustering routing protocol is proposed.
To apply the key renewal scheme with sensor authentication, sensor nodes are first authenticated during the key establishment procedure and then the symmetric key is updated periodically using hash functions. The simulation results show that the proposed key renewal scheme lengthens the network lifetime and has shorter activity time of attackers in spite of increasing the number of compromised nodes.