Hierarchical key management for mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) face serious security problems due to their unique characteristics such as mobility dynamic topology, and lack of central infrastructure support. In conventional networks, deploying a robust and reliable security mechanism such as public key infrastructure (PKI) requires a central certification authority (CA) or trusted third party to provide fundamental security services including digital certificates, authentication and encryption. In our scheme, distributing the certificate authority functionality among a number of mobile nodes provides distributed, fault tolerant, and hierarchical key management services. It is designed in such a way that each threshold level offers a different level of security, which helps to classify security needs for a wide variety of applications. Performance results prove the effectiveness of our key management scheme.