Abstract: In not distant future, the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is widely used in many applications like military and civil domains. The wireless sensor networks are always deployed in hostile and pervasive environment. Security is major worry in wireless sensor network. The traditional network security methods are not suitable for wireless sensor networks because of limited resource. Several Key management and establishment schemes have been suggested to provide light weight ciphers. The key management schemes play an important role in wireless sensor networks toachieve security. Basically, key management includes two aspects: key distribution and key revocation. Key distribution refers to the task of distributing secret keys between communicating parties to provide secrecy and authentication. Key revocation directs to the task of securely removing compromised keys. By revoking all of the keys of a compromised sensor node, node can be removed from the network. As compared to key distribution, key revocation has received very little attention. In this paper a survey of key management schemes in wireless sensor networks has been executed.

Keywords: Secret key sharing, key management schemes, wireless sensor network, symmetric algorithms.