A Survey of Key Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Security has become a primary concern in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The characteristics of MANETs pose both challenges and opportunities in achieving security goals, such as confidentiality, authentication, integrity, availability, access control, and non-repudiation. Usually, cryptographic techniques are widely used for secure communications in wired and wireless networks. Most cryptographic mechanisms, such as symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, often involve the use of cryptographic keys. In fact, any cryptographic means are ineffective if its key management is weak. Key management is also a central aspect for the security of MANETs. The purpose of key management is to provide secure procedures for handling cryptographic keying materials. The task of key management includes key generation, key distribution, and key maintenance. Key maintenance includes the procedures for key storage, key update, key revocation, key archiving, etc. In MANETs, the computational load and complexity for key management are strongly subject to restriction by the node’s available resources and the dynamic nature of network topology. A number of key management schemes have been proposed for the MANETs. In this article, we present a survey of the research work on the key management in MANETs according to recent literature.