Distributed Pairwise Key Generation Using Shared Polynomials for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The infrastructure-less property of wireless ad hoc network makes the traditional central server based security management schemes unsuitable and requires the use of a distributed key management mechanism. In this paper, we propose a distributed pairwise key establishment scheme based on the concept of bivariate polynomials. In our method, any mobile node in an ad hoc network can securely communicate with other nodes just by knowing their corresponding IDs. The bivariate polynomials are shared in such a manner that the shares depend on the coefficient matrix of the polynomial, the requesting node's ID and the ID of the nodes that respond to the request. We study the behavior of our scheme through simulations and show that our scheme compares well with other schemes and has a much better performance when averaged over the lifetime of the network.