An efficient pairwise key establishment scheme for Ad-Hoc Mobile Clouds

An Ad-hoc Mobile Cloud (AMC) is a new computing model that allows sharing computing power of multiple mobile devices. For a diverse group of individuals that employ such computing model, in an ad-hoc manner, secure peer-to-peer communication becomes very important. Using private or pairwise keys to secure such communication is preferable to public-keys because of computation and energy requirements [1]. With the advent of sensor enabled mobile devices, a protocol (SekGens) that uses sensor data to generate pairwise keys on demand has been proposed [2]. To work successfully SekGens requires devices to be closely located and becomes infeasible for devices situated multiple hops away. SekGens is also expensive in computation and slow in key generation. In this paper, we investigate how to enable devices in an AMC to establish pairwise keys. We propose an efficient solution which tries to reduce the number of executions of SekGens in the AMC, and establishes pairwise keys between nodes multiple hops away by distributing parts of the key on multiple routing paths. Our results show a reduction of up to 75% in the number of SekGens required to establish keys in an AMC, when compared to a naive approach.