Efficient and Secure Self-Organized Public Key Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a fully self-organized key management scheme for mobile ad hoc networks. Unlike most previous schemes, there is no priori shared secret or no priori trust relationship in the proposed scheme; every node plays the same role and carries out the same function of key management. The proposed scheme consists of (1) Handshaking (HS) and (2) Certificate request/reply (CRR) procedures. In HS, a node acquires the public key of the approaching node via a secure side channel. In CRR, a node requests certificates of a remote node via a radio channel to the nodes that it has HSed. If the number of received valid certificates that contain the same public key exceeds a given threshold, the node accepts the remote node's public key as valid. Security is rigorously analyzed against various known attacks and network costs are intensively analyzed mathematically. Using this analysis, we provide parameter selection guideline to optimize performance and to maintain security for diverse cases. Simulation results show that every node acquires the public keys of all other nodes at least 5 times faster than in a previous scheme.