Authenticated and efficient key management for wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper we present a key management protocol for wireless ad hoc multi-hop networks. Two objectives were crucial in our design: (1) distributed trust to ensure robustness, and (2) strong authentication to prevent the battery drain attack. We achieve distributed trust by presenting a hierarchical and distributed public key infrastructure for ad hoc networks. Our PKI has been designed to map onto hierarchical ad hoc networks, while maintaining global connectivity and flexibility. If a misbehavior detection scheme is present on the network, then the security of our PKI can be improved through collaboration with this scheme. Next to this PKI we propose a mechanism to securely establish and maintain link keys between the dierent