Hierarchical Approach for Key Management in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of autonomous nodes or terminals which communicate with each other by forming a multi-hop radio network and maintaining connectivity in a decentralized manner. The conventional security solutions to provide key management through accessing trusted authorities or centralized servers are infeasible for this new environment since mobile ad hoc networks are characterized by the absence of any infrastructure, frequent mobility, and wireless links. We propose a hierarchical group key management scheme that is hierarchical and fully distributed with no central authority and uses a simple rekeying procedure which is suitable for large and high mobility mobile ad hoc networks. The rekeying procedure requires only one round in our scheme and Chinese Remainder Theorem Diffie Hellman Group Diffie Hellmann and Burmester and Desmedt it is a constant 3 whereas in other schemes such as Distributed Logical Key Hierarchy and Distributed One Way Function Trees, it depends on the number of members. We reduce the energy consumption during communication of the keying materials by reducing the number of bits in the rekeying message. We show through analysis and simulations that our scheme has less computation, communication and energy consumption compared to the existing schemes. Keywordsmobile ad hoc network; key management; rekeying.