Establishing Pairwise Keys for Secure Communication in Ad Hoc Networks: A Probabilistic Approach

  • Authors:
  • Sencun Zhu;Shouhuai Xu;Sanjeev Setia;Sushil Jajodia

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICNP '03 Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

A prerequisite for secure communication between two nodes in an ad hoc network is that the nodes share a key to bootstrap their trust relationship. In this paper, we present a scalable and distributed protocol that enables two nodes to establish a pairwise shared key on the fly, without requiring the use of any on-line key distribution center. The design of our protocol is based on a novel combination of two techniques 驴 probabilistic key sharing and threshold secret sharing. Our protocol is scalable since every node only needs to possess a small number of keys, independent of the network size, and it is computationally efficient because it only relies on symmetric key cryptography based operations. We show that a pairwise key established between two nodes using our protocol is secure against a collusion attack by up to a certain number of compromised nodes. We also show through a set of simulations that our protocol can be parameterized to meet the desired levels of performance, security and storage for the application under consideration.