A Scalable Mutual Authentication and Key Distribution Mechanism in a NEMO Environment

Abstract

Long an issue of interest, network mobility technology is now being realized with the foundation of the NEMO(Network Mobility) Working Group (WG) in the IETF. Security problems for NEMO become more important because one or several MR(Mobile Router)s manage the mobility of an entire network as well as the nested mobile networks, but current NEMO lacks the defense mechanism against these problems. Thus, in this paper, we propose a scalable and ubiquitous mutual authentication and key distribution mechanism without TTP(Trusted Third Party) for a NEMO environment, that uses the threshold secret sharing technique for enhancing scalability and availability, and provides the low-processing for requirement of frequent mutual authentication by mobility. We simulated and analyzed our mechanism together with another general authentication mechanism in the view of scalability and processing delay. Our experimental results show that our mechanism provides a scalable security support for a NEMO environment.