A secure pairwise key establishment scheme in wireless ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are exposed to numerous security threats that can adversely affect the success of important applications. Security services such as authentication and key management are important to secure the communication between two nodes in the networks. In the existing key pre-distribution schemes, each node is equipped with a weak authentication mechanism to identify neighboring nodes. During the secret key discovery phase, when any two nodes share at least one key information, one node considers the other side to be worthy of confidence and discloses all the shared information to it without a doubt. These schemes are vulnerable to active attack from authorized nodes as well as unauthorized nodes. This paper proposes a novel key management scheme: each node reduces the disclosure of the shared key information and the network provides strong authentication and privacy. Performance and security analyses have proven that our scheme is suitable for ad hoc networks in terms of availability and security aspects.