Efficient, Fault-Tolerant and Distributed Key Agreement for Arbitrary Deployment in MANETS
Abstract
Military command and control require that information be communicated to the appropriate groups and only with the utmost security. The environment envisioned by the Objective Force is mobile ad-hoc and consists of a large number of (heterogeneous) resource-constrained nodes deployed in a hostile field of limited bandwidth, unreliable channels, and frequent node failures, where usually there is not infrastructure for communications, and where it must be dynamically generated. The challenge lies in designing secure group communications that can be applied to such dynamic, constrained FCSs. In this work we develop a secure, fault-tolerant and scalable (for increasing number of users) contributory key agreement scheme (KA) for multicast communications. By generating hierarchy, applying improved and more resilient contributory protocols to smaller subsets of nodes, focusing on the exact topology of nodes deployed in the network, and by exploiting the redundancy issued by the topology itself, we successfully meet our objectives. Our protocol - Clustered Local Contributory (CLC) - is secure (against eavesdropping adversaries) and captures the dynamics of subgroups. It is highly fault-tolerant and very efficient in terms of communication and computation overhead. According to the results of the comparative evaluation of CLC and some of the most common contributory protocols in the literature (e.g., GDH.2) we conducted, it appears that CLC presents superior performance in terms of communication, computation and storage overhead incurred to the network in order to secure group communications in MANETs.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA432125
Entities
People
- Giovanni Di Crescenzo
- Maria Striki
Organizations
- University of Maryland