An Efficient Rekeying Function Protocol with Multicast Key Distribution for Group Key Management in MANETs

Key management in the ad hoc network is a challenging issue concerning the security of the group communication. Group key management protocols can be approximately categorized into three: centralized, decentralized, and distributed. The much apt solution to provide the services like authentication, data integrity and data confidentiality is the establishment of a key management protocol. This paper proposes an approach for the design and analysis of region-based key management protocols with a new multicast key distribution scheme for scalable and reconfigurable group key management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The region-based group key management protocol partitions a group into region-based subgroups based on decentralized key management principles by using the Novel ReKeying Function Protocol (NRFP). An issue is aroused by most of the centralized key management protocols on data security on group communication. The proposed system significantly reduces the computation complexity. Instead using conventional encryption algorithms, the proposed scheme employs an MDS code which is a class of error control codes, to distribute multicast key dynamically. This scheme considerably reduces the computation load of each group member compared to existing schemes employing traditional encryption algorithms. Such a scheme is advantageous for many wireless applications where portable devices or sensors need to reduce their computation as much as possible because of battery power limitations. Simply combined with any key-tree-based schemes, this scheme affords much lower computation complexity while maintaining low and balanced communication complexity and storage complexity for secure dynamic multicast key distribution. Keywords-Cluster Head, Group Key, Key Management Protocol, Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), Region-based and Rekeying, multicast, MD5 codes, erasure decoding