An Efficient Key Exchange Protocol for Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET’s), due to their lack of physical infrastructures or centralized online authorities, pose a number of security challenges to a protocol designer. Traditional network authentication solutions rely on trusted third party servers (Certificate Authorities, CA). These servers should physically be present in the network. However, ad hoc networks are infrastructure-less, and there is no centralized server for key agreement. Hence traditional solutions do not meet the requirements of mobile ad hoc networks. We propose a key agreement protocol for pairwise key establishment in mobile ad hoc networks which does not require any centralized support. The mechanism is built using the well-known technique of threshold secret sharing and network clustering, and is robust and secure against a collusion of up to a certain number of nodes. This protocol is good adapted with node movements and due to use of clustering, the imposed overhead is very low compared with some similar key establishment protocols.