A decentralized key management scheme via neighborhood prediction in mobile wireless networks

Abstract

The wireless data collected in mobile environments provides tremendous opportunities to build new applications in various domains such as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks and mobile social networks. One of the biggest challenges is how to store these data. Storing the data decentralized in wireless devices is an attractive approach because of its major advantages over centralized ones. In this work, to facilitate effective access control of the wireless data in distributed data storage, we propose a fully decentralized key management scheme by utilizing a cryptography-based secret sharing method. The secret sharing method splits the keys into multiple shares and distributes them to multiple nodes, which brings the challenge that due to node mobility, these key shares may not be available in the neighborhood when they are needed for key reconstruction. To address this challenge arising from mobile environments, we propose the Transitive Prediction(TRAP) protocol that distributes key shares among devices that are traveling together. We derive a theoretical analysis of the robustness of our approach. Furthermore, inside TRAP, we develop three key distribution schemes that utilize the correlation relationship embedded among devices that are traveling together. Our key distribution schemes maximize the chance of successful key reconstruction and minimize the communication overhead. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that our key distribution schemes are highly effective, and thus provide strong evidence of the feasibility of applying our approach to support distributed data storage in wireless networks.