Based On One-way Hash Chain For Ad Hoc Network Authentication And Key Management Research

As a new kind of wireless networks, Ad Hoc network has been widely used for military, business and daily life. But Ad Hoc network has more serious security problems than the traditional networks because of its inherent characteristics. The security issues have seriously hindered the development of Ad Hoc network. The authentication and key management are the key issue among them, and now they have been a hot research. In this paper, the characteristics of Ad Hoc network are firstly described to analyze the existence of security issues. Then the existing authentication and key management schemes are summarized. It worked out that though most of the schemes are focus a lot on security, there have been another problem on big computing cost, which cannot well apply for the limited computing ability and battery energy of the nodes in Ad Hoc network.To solve this problem, a mutual authentication scheme is proposed firstly. It is based on self-updating hash chain, using one-way hash chain technology to avoid the computing complexity of the traditional public-key algorithms, and achieves the hash chain infinitely self-updating automatically and smoothly during the authentication process. So it greatly reduces the computation overhead. Then, a new key agreement protocol for the large Ad Hoc network is proposed, using our mutual authentication scheme .The new protocol enjoys many secure properties such as the reliability of the node's identity, the message integrity, the forward security and the session key independence. Its correctness and related performance are tested in the NS2 simulation environment. The simulation results show that our key agreement protocol has such advantages as higher efficiency, greatly reduced the computing cost of mobile terminals, well fitted in the Ad Hoc network with limited resource.