hierarchy-based key management for secure group communications in mobile ad hoc networks
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a kind of wireless communication infrastructure that does not have base stations or routers. Each node acts as a router and is responsible for dynamically discovering other nodes it can directly communicate with. However, when a message without encryption is sent out through a general tunnel, it may be maliciously attacked. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical key management scheme (HKMS) for secure group communications in MANETs. For the sake of security, we encrypt a packet twice. Due to the frequent changes of the topology of a MANET, we also discuss group maintenance in this paper. Finally, we conducted the security and performance analysis to compare the proposed scheme with Tseng's [13] and Steiner's [12] schemes.
key management group communication mobile ad hoc networks network security group key