An on-demand key establishment protocol for MANETs

Abstract

Securing ad-hoc networks is a challenging task owing to their specific characteristics. One of the major challenges is that ad-hoc networks typically lack a fixed infrastructure, both in the form of physical nodes such as routers, servers and stable communication links, and in the form of an organisational or administrative infrastructure. Thus new nodes can join and leave the network at any time, which appeals to an efficient and flexible trust establishment mechanism. We propose in this paper an efficient protocol for key management in ad-hoc networks relying on the routing mechanism itself, which reduces efficiently the overhead and provides better performances.