International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In 2012, Alagheband and Aref presented a dynamic and secure key manage

ment model for hierarchical heterogeneous sensor networks. They proposed a signcryption algorithm which is the main building block in their key management model. They proved the algorithm is as strong as the elliptical curve discrete logarithm problem. In this work,

we study the security of their signcryption algorithm. It is regretful that we found their algorithm is insecure. The adversary can impersonate the base station by sending forged messages to the cluster leaders after capturing the signcrypted messages. Hence, the key management model proposed by them is insecure. Then, we propose an improved signcryption algorithm to fix this weakness.