Probabilistic distributed key pre-distribution for mobile ad hoc networks

Key management is an essential cryptographic primitive upon which other security primitives are built. Among the solutions to the key management problem in ad hoc networks, key pre-distribution schemes (KPS) seem to be a practical option, tolerant to changing topology and broken links. However, relying on trusted dealers, although only needed in initialization, renders KPS inapplicable in many ad hoc network scenarios and lead to a single point of vulnerability. We present protocols for the distributed key pre-distribution scheme (DKPS) paradigm, which eliminates the need of a trusted dealer in KPS and realizes fully distributed and self-organized KPS without relying on any infrastructure support. We especially focus on the secure shared key discovery (SSD), a component of DKPS, and present two protocols to realize it.