Detecting Vulnerable Nodes and Mitigating Node Capture Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Threshold-Based ECDHE

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in critical applications such as environmental monitoring, healthcare, industrial automation, and military surveillance; however, their resource constraints, wireless communication, and unattended deployment make them highly vulnerable to node capture attacks.In such attacks, adversaries physically compromise sensor nodes to extract cryptographic keys and sensitive information, leading to key leakage, node impersonation, communication disruption, and large-scale network compromise.Existing key management schemes often rely on static key structures, they lack forward secrecy, and fail to identify structurally vulnerable nodes, resulting in weak resilience against progressive node capture attacks.To address these limitations, this paper proposes a threshold-based ECDHE-TSSS key management framework to detect vulnerable nodes and mitigate node capture attacks in WSNs.The proposed scheme introduces an attack matrix based on graph-theoretic metrics to identify high-risk nodes and provide adaptive protection through decentralized masking of secret shares.The Proposed Scheme integrates Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) with Threshold Shamir Secret Sharing (TSSS) to achieve forward secrecy and strong resistance against node compromise while maintaining lightweight operations suitable for resource-constrained environments.A layered security architecture incorporating Schnorr-based Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof (NIZKP) authentication and distributed key revocation further enhances network resilience and secure communication.Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly reduces key compromise probability and improves overall network robustness compared with existing approaches.