Method And Techniques Of Key Management And Authentication In Wireless Networks

With the rapid development of wireless communication and related technologies, wireless networks are becoming the basis of the people long-term pursuit that enjoy anytime, anywhere access to information and facilitate network service. However, compared with the wired networks, wireless networks facing more risk due to wireless channel open and constrained resource of wireless devices, the security of wireless networks becomes the focus. The key management and authentication are the base and critical technology of the wireless network security. Therefore, it is significant to study the method and techniques of key management and authentication in wireless networksThis dissertation makes a comparative deep research on key agreement, authentication and group key management in wireless networks, which includes: provable secure wireless Internet key agreement method, authentication method for fast handoff in wireless Mesh networks, self-healing group key distribution method in wireless networks, and group key management in wireless sensor networks. The main results are as following:1. It is necessary to protect the identity information to initiator under the environment of wireless access network. A novel key exchange protocol for wireless network based on IKEv2 initial exchange is proposed. With the Universally Composable security model, this new protocol is analyzed in details, and performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol has less computation and communication overhead.2. The security problem of fast handoffs in WLAN Mesh networks with mobile Mesh Access Point is analyzed. Based on the neighbor graph fast handover method and matrix-based key pre-distribution scheme, an authentication scheme for fast handoff is proposed. The scheme is suitable to the WLAN Mesh networks with mobile MAP.3. The self-healing group key management method is studied. Based on a secret sharing method in which each user's secret shadow is selected by the user himself, a self-healing group key distribution scheme is proposed. The scheme enables each group member's personal secret key is selected by the member himself, the group manager dose not have to distribute each member's personal secret key, no secure channel is required to be established between the group manager and each member. The performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme has less storage cost and communication cost.4. The key management and broadcast authentication in wireless sensor networks is studied. Based on group key distribution and revocation method using dual direction key chains, a self-healing group key management scheme with revocation capability for wireless sensor networks is presented. The proposed scheme implements the self-healing function of group key and node revocation capability, and satisfies the desired security requirements of sensor networks group key management in presence of a high losing packet rate of wireless communication environments, such as the group key confidentiality, forward secrecy and backward secrecy.