Key management in wireless ad hoc networks: collusion analysis and prevention

Due to the dynamic nature of WAHN communications and the multi-node involvement in most WAHN applications, group key management has been proposed for efficient support of secure communications in WAHNs. Exclusion Basis Systems (EBS) provide a framework for scalable and efficient group key management where the number of keys per node and the number of re-key messages can be relatively adjusted. EBS-based solutions, however, may suffer from collusion attacks, where a number of nodes may collaborate to reveal all system keys and consequently capture the network. In this paper we investigate the collusion problem in EBS and demonstrate that a careful assignment of keys to nodes reduces collusion. Since an optimal assignment is NP hard, we propose a location-based heuristic where keys are assigned to neighboring nodes depending on the hamming distance between the strings of bits representing the used subset of the keys employed in the system. Simulation results have demonstrated that our p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IPCCC
• Authors: Mohamed F. Younis, Kajaldeep Ghumman, Mohamed Eltoweissy
• Keywords: Collusion, Group Key Management, IPCCC 2005, Keys