Group Key Agreement in Ad hoc Networks

As the ubiquitous and pervasive computing paradigms gain popularity, Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) are receiving the increased attention of the research community. Essentially a MANET is a collection of mobile nodes communicating over wireless channels with little (if any at all) fixed, wired infrastructure. Such networks present a number of new challenges to many cryptographic techniques for collaborative group communication including Group Key Agreement. In this report are presented these challenges, some Group Key Agreement protocols proposed for Collaborative Groups and a discussion on their suitability for the MANET environment

Efficient and Dynamic Group Key Agreement in Ad hoc Networks

Confidentiality, integrity and authentication are more relevant issues in Ad hoc networks than in wired fixed networks. One way to address these issues is the use of symmetric key cryptography, relying on a secret key shared by all members of the network. But establishing and maintaining such a key (also called the session key) is a non-trivial problem. We show that Group Key Agreement (GKA) protocols are suitable for establishing and maintaining such a session key in these dynamic networks. We take an existing GKA protocol, which is robust to connectivity losses and discuss all the issues for good functioning of this protocol in Ad hoc networks. We give implementation details and network parameters, which significantly reduce the computational burden of using public key cryptography in such networks

Group Key Agreement for Ad Hoc Networks

Over the last 30 years the study of group key agreement has stimulated much work. And as a result of the increased popularity of ad hoc networks, some approaches for the group key establishment in such networks are proposed. However, they are either only for static group or the memory, computation and communication costs are unacceptable for ad-hoc networks. In this thesis some protocol suites from the literature (2^d-cube, 2^d-octopus, Asokan-Ginzboorg, CLIQUES, STR and TGDH) shall be discussed. We have optimized STR and TGDH by reducing the memory, communication and computation costs. The optimized version are denoted by µSTR and µTGDH respectively. Based on the protocol suites µSTR and µTGDH we present a Tree-based group key agreement Framework for Ad-hoc Networks (TFAN). TFAN is especially suitable for ad-hoc networks with limited bandwidth and devices with limited memory and computation capability. To simulate the protocols, we have implemented TFAN, µSTR and µTGDH with J2ME CDC. The TFAN API will be described in this thesis

Efficient group key agreement & recovery in ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are dynamic peer-to-peer wireless networks composed of a collection of nodes which employ wireless transmission methods in a self-organized way without relying on fixed infrastructure or predetermined connectivity. Such networks pose great challenges in group communication. In this paper, we propose an efficient group key agreement and recovery mechanism based on key escrow systems for ad hoc networks. Nodes randomly change their operation and perform authentication services for specific groups

Efficient and Dynamic Group Key Agreement in Ad hoc Networks

Confidentiality, integrity and authentication are more relevant issues in Ad hoc networks than in wired fixed networks. One way to address these issues is the use of symmetric key cryptography, relying on a secret key shared by all members of the network. But establishing and maintaining such a key (also called the session key) is a non-trivial problem. We show that Group Key Agreement (GKA) protocols are suitable for establishing and maintaining such a session key in these dynamic networks. We take an existing GKA protocol, which is robust to connectivity losses and discuss all the issues for good functioning of this protocol in Ad hoc networks. We give implementation details and network parameters, which significantly reduce the computational burden of using public key cryptography in such networks

A lightweight group-key management protocol for secure ad-hoc-network routing

AbstractSecure routing protocols for ad hoc networks use group keys for authenticating control messages without high energy consumption. A distributed and robust group-key management is, thus, essential. This paper proposes and specifies a protocol for distributing and managing group keys in ad hoc environments based on the Secure Optimized Link State Routing protocol (SOLSR). The proposed protocol manages group keys taking into consideration frequent network partitions/mergers and also reduces the impact of non-authorized users that try to illegitimately obtain the group key to use network resources. The analysis shows that our proposal provides high availability and presents low energy consumption for the two most important group events in ad hoc network: joining-node events and network-partition-merging events. Our protocol reduces both the number of control messages and the energy spent with cryptographic operations by up to three orders of magnitude when compared to contributory group-key agreement algorithms. The proposed protocol provides an efficient key management in a timely manner