A Self-healing Key Distribution Scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Group communication in mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET), because of its special characteristics of large-scale mobile nodes, frequent change and update of group members relationship, open and unstable communication channel and high rate of packets loss, making secure group communication in MANET face many security threats, so how to realize secure communication between mobile nodes and how to establish secure session keys shared between mobile nodes has been the focus of MANET. Aimed at the problem mentioned above, a group key distribution scheme based on three hash chains is proposed for MANET. This scheme introduces a self-healing hash chain based on Dual Directional Hash Chain(DDHC), when a node is revoked, the corresponding self-healing hash value will be replaced by a new random value, so that revoked nodes can not realize collusion attack with the newly added node; This scheme also takes into account the high rate of packet loss in MANET, and realizes self-healing property. The security and performance analysis shows that the scheme can meet the security requirements of group communication for MANET, and it has the characteristics of dynamic revocation and resists collusion. The scheme also reduces the storage overhead and the communication load to a large extent, and can meet the performance requirements of group communication for MANET.