A Group Key Management Mechanism In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary computer communication networks without the aid of any established infrastructure. Designing the kind of network is facing a great challenge because of its acentric, dynamic topology and realtime changed link. One of the challenges is the frangibility in withstanding the attacks of security.Multicast is one of main communications in MANET, Instead of using multiple unicast transmissions, it is advantageous to use multicast in order to save network bandwidth and resources, since a single message can be delivered to multiple receivers simultaneously. Symmetric-key cryptography is usually used in multicast. Symmetric-key algorithms are generally more computational-efficient than the public-key approach.Group key management has extensive applications. First, the technology of group key management can be applied to secure routing and secure group communication. Second, secure problem in routing can be treated as a secure group communication problem with all the nodes in the same group. So group key management has become a research hotpot.Most existing solutions in general are of two types: key agreement and pre-distribution. Key agreement protocols do not usually require a trusted authority. All members must join the computation of group key. A shortcoming of these protocols is that they usually are based on a logic construction and routing infrastructure. The later solution requires little interaction between nodes, however these schemes can be compromised if more than t nodes collude. We propose a fully decentralized group key agreement mechanism that based on a novel key share pre-distribution and threshold cryptography. The scheme can work without any routing infrastructure or any logic construction. We compare our scheme with other competing scheme and show its appreciable performance that the new scheme is very simple, secure and fault-tolerant. Finally simulation results show that group members accounted for the greater proportion of the network, the higher efficiency of implementation.