Research For Key Management Based On ECC In Ad Hoc Networks

As a special form of mobile computer networks, Ad hoc networks will have been widely used in the future, which can be deployed in battle field, temporary meeting, disaster rescue and other civil or military environments. In most of these applications, the security is always very importance. The key management is the base of security, so the research for key management schemes has become important in Ad hoc networks.First, we make a survey of the recent works about key management schemes for Ad hoc networks, which includes presenting a unique set of challenges of key managing for Ad hoc networks and describing the principles and comparisons of some main key management schemes that are proposed in the literature, then, the paper discusses several issues of designing schemes and also suggests the research direction in key management for Ad hoc networks in the future.Most of key management schemes that use public-key cryptography are based on RSA. Compared with RSA, ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem) has characteristics of secure, lower computation, shorter keys on the same security level and so on. So it is attractive to apply ECC to key managing for Ad hoc networks. We achieve ECC with chosen algorithms that are proper for Ad hoc networks.For most of key management schemes for Ad hoc networks have been proposed do not provide proper tradeoffs between security, efficiency, computational cost, and balanced service loads of Server nodes. We present a novel scheme. The scheme, termed as EECTKM (efficient (t, n) threshold key management scheme), is based on elliptic curve. In the scheme, the certificate authority (CA) is distributed to a group of Server nodes. EECTKM can balances the loads of services of Server nodes and maintains certain number Server nodes in network dynamically. By qualitative analysis, it has characteristics of high security, less computational cost, balanced service loads of Server nodes and good ability to tolerate failure of Server node etc.Then, we introduce the simulation tool of NS2 and describe the simulation framework that can be used to evaluate the performance of EECTKM. Furthermore, we give the simulation realization of EECTKM in detail. Finally, by simulation, we analyze and evaluate the performance of EECTKM quantitatively, and make a comparison of performance of EECTKM with that of the fixed Server nodes scheme. According to simulation results, EECTKM can enhance the efficiency of public key certificate services and has good ability to tolerate failure of Server node.