An unbalanced key establishment scheme for heterogeneous wireless networks

In this paper, we present an unbalanced key establishment scheme for a heterogeneous wireless network environment. We use powerful access points as multiple security managers to configure low-end reduced functional devices (RFD) on site. Our scheme is proposed to set up the master key between a roaming RFD node and a security manager during the handoff process, which exploits the difference in device capabilities, and puts the cryptographic burden where resources are less constrained. The scheme authenticates the device identities in a flexible manner, based on asymmetric certificates. A TESLA certificate is deployed to enable efficient certificate verification on RFD nodes. Our protocol offloads the expensive public key operations from the low-end RFD nodes to powerful security managers, and has less computation complexity than all the other authenticated key agreement protocols that adopt elliptic curve cryptography.