Pairwise Key Generation Scheme for Cellular Mobile Communication

Abstract

We present two new key generation schemes for secure communication between a pair of mobile nodes (cell phones). Unlike existing algorithms, our scheme does not (a) store a key chain in the memory from a universal key space, (b) use key broadcast, (c) distribute selected keys to the network nodes, and (d) use database of keys for selecting keys for communication. Rather, the pair of nodes that want to communicate securely generate identical keys independently with the help of a head node. We show the behavior of these schemes through a simple analytical model.