A dynamic key management scheme for MANETs

Key management scheme is a critical issue of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Malicious nodes may attack the legitimate nodes by eavesdropping. Data encryption is a solution to resolve this problem. Due to the restricted energy and computational capability of MANETs, it´s necessary to design a lightweight and storage efficient key management scheme. In this paper, we propose a hop-by-hop authentication and routing-driven dynamic key management scheme. An improved Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) protocol with mutual authentication is used to generate pair-wise keys, and the pair-wise keys are stored in caches before their expiration. The simulation results and performance evaluation show that the proposed scheme can reduce more key storage space than other schemes. Furthermore, it increases the security level of MANETs.