New non-interactive key agreement and progression (NIKAP) protocols and their applications to security in ad hoc networks

Abstract

Symmetric cryptographic primitives are preferable in designing security protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) because they are computationally affordable for resource-constrained mobile devices forming a MANET. Most proposed key-distribution and key-agreement schemes for symmetric cryptosystem assume services from on-line centralized authorities, or require the interaction between communicating parties. However, the presence of a centralized authority violates the ad hoc definition of MANETs, and interactive schemes require the routing of the ad hoc network to be established before the key agreement, which is difficult to ensure in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). We propose a new non-interactive key agreement and progression (NIKAP) scheme for MANETs, which does not require an on-line centralized authority, can establish and update pairwise shared keys between any two nodes in a non-interactive manner, is configurable to operate synchronously (S-NIKAP) or asynchronously (A-NIKAP), and is able to provide differentiated security services w.r.t. specified security policies. As the name implies, NIKAP is especially valuable to scenarios in which shared secret keys are desired to be computed without negotiation between nodes over insecure channels, and need to be updated frequently