The design of a secure key management system for mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Key management is an important service for providing secure communications when the network size is large or the topology is undergoing frequent changes. In most existing key management schemes, a centralized key certification authority is used; however, it is not suitable for wireless environments due to the networkspsila scalability and the insufficient computation ability of mobile nodes. In this paper, a novel key management scheme is presented that emphasizes the secure and efficient key updates by using a frequency-based approach. Furthermore, our scheme makes use of a combination of both symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms to protect other aspects of key management, such as data confidentiality, key distribution, etc. Simulation experiments are implemented based on the ns-2 simulator and show that our frequency-based rekeying scheme has a better performance in comparison to other traditional schemes. Our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme not only achieves the necessary and efficient key updates but also provides more security in mobile ad hoc networks.