Hash-chain based peer-peer key management and establishment of security associations in MANETS

Key management has always been an issue in ad hoc networks. These networks are infrastructure-less which gives the attackers an open chance to intrude and operate it on their will. A lot of work has been done in the area but the techniques were either less secured or require too many computations and were based on asymmetric or symmetric key management cryptographic schemes. The employment of such schemes requires a trusted third party to provide the secret keys to all nodes in the ad hoc network before network formation, which can be taken as a serious flaw. The ideal form of the ad hoc networks functions in a self-organized manner. We have a proposed a hash chain based peer to peer key management and establishing the security association, which eliminates the need for third party key initializing in all the nodes and emphasize on self-organization.