Secure authenticated group key agreement protocol in the MANET environment

Abstract

Due to dynamic and infrastructure-less nature of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) environment, there exist number of threats as mobile devices and nodes could freely move around in MANET such as eavesdropping of communications channels, modification of sensitive m-commerce transactions, Denial of Service(DoS), vulnerabilities of impersonation by malicious insiders etc. In this paper, we propose a novel authenticated group key agreement protocol for end-to-end security in the MANET environment without any infrastructure that is based on Burmester and Desmedt group key agreement protocol (Burmester M, Desmedt Y. A secure and efficient conference key distribution system. Advances in Cryptology – EuroCrypt ’94, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1995;950:275–86) and their variants (Choi KY, Hwang JY, Lee DH. Efficient ID-based group key agreement with bilinear maps. Public Key Cryptography – PKC, Lecture Notes in Computer 2004;2947:130–144)]. We also design practical enhancements of BD and Choi et al.'s protocols that not only detect, but also identify malicious insiders by using the trusted arbiter who only involves in the protocol if the cheating has been occurred.