Resilient and Robust Key Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In contrast with traditional networks, with the characteristics of mobile wireless devices that can dynamically form a network without any infrastructure and wired line, mobile ad hoc networks usually do not provide on-line access to trusted authorities or to centralized servers. Furthermore, they frequently exhibit partition due to link or node failures or node mobility. For these reasons, if we apply traditional PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) security architecture to mobile ad hoc networks, it will appear secure blind sides especially in large-scale ad hoc networks. For this point of view, we propose a new scalable and robust cluster-organized key management scheme and distribution of trust to an aggregation of nodes by taking advantage of threshold scheme faculty to provide mobile ad hoc networks with robust key management. Furthermore, our approach provides CA (Certificate Authority) with fault tolerance mechanism to keep off single point of failure or single point of compromise, and saves CA large repository maintaining members’ certificates that make our approach more suitable for many mobile devices. In addition, we enhance the routing performance and non-repudiation and propose a mathematical model to prove our cluster-based communication performance that is better than node-based approach.