Self-healing key management service for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a robust key management scheme for supporting the secure communication needs of emergency response operations. The proposed scheme aims to tolerate the dynamic nature of such operations where some system and network components may be damaged or redeployed frequently. Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is widely accepted to be a suitable approach to meet the communication needs of emergency response operations. Such operations tend to be carried out in an environment where existing infrastructures have been destroyed by natural disasters. Security is an important feature of the underlying Command, Control and Communication (C3) systems of emergency response operations. Security functions almost invariably require the support of some key management services. Distributed CA (DCA) is one of the most important schemes to key management in MANET; however the key management service may fail if some of the DCA nodes disappear from the system due to the physical damages in the harsh field environment or redeployment of some participating agencies. In this paper, we propose a self-healing key management service which is capable of detecting failure of DCA nodes and reconstructing the key management service automatically without requiring a trusted third party. Network simulation results shows that our scheme is effective in terms of failure detection and recovery and introduces only a very moderate communication overhead to the network in most of the time.