Channel-aware key management in MANET with artificial noise forwarding

Abstract

Due to the dynamic configuration property and shared broadcast wireless medium in MANET, security is of much concern in this type of network. The existing resource-efficient schemes require the presence of a Trusted-Third-Party to distribute key-shares among nodes offline, or propose that the nodes should contain a set of large number of key-identifiers before forming the network. However, these schemes are not practically suitable as physical capture or betrayal of a node may expose the stored set of secret keys and key-identifiers to the attackers. In this paper we propose a channel-aware key-distribution scheme that utilizes symmetric property of wireless broadcast channels in presence of passive attackers. Our distributed scheme applies superposition property of the wireless medium to forward artificial noise towards unintended passive eavesdroppers during key-distribution among intended receiver network nodes. The scheme requires co-ordination between Key distribution centre transmitters and key-share receiving receivers, and a basic transmission infrastructure during scheduling of secret transmission. Therefore, we also propose a procedure to induce a virtual periodic infrastructure inside the MANET to monitor the network topology.