Key distribution protocol for Identity Hiding in MANETs

Abstract

Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) are formed when a group of mobile nodes, communicate through wireless links in the absence of central administration. These features make them more vulnerable to several attacks like identity spoofing which leads to identity disclosure. Providing anonymity and privacy for identity are critical issues, especially when the size of such networks scales up. to avoid the centralization problem for key distribution in MANETs. This paper proposes a key distribution scheme for clustered ad-hoc networks. The network is divided into groups of clusters, and each cluster head is responsible for distributing periodically updated security keys among cluster members, for protecting privacy through encryption. Also, an authentication scheme is proposed to ensure the confidentiality of new members to the cluster. The simulation study proves the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of availability and overhead. It scales well for high dense networks and gives less packet drop rate compared to its centralized counterpart in the presence of malicious nodes.