A hierarchical key management scheme for secure group communications in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a kind of wireless communication infrastructure that does not have base stations or routers. Each node acts as a router and is responsible for dynamically discovering other nodes it can directly communicate with. However, when a message without encryption is sent out through a general tunnel, it may be maliciously attacked. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical key management scheme (HKMS) for secure group communications in MANETs. For the sake of security, we encrypt a packet twice. Due to the frequent changes of the topology of a MANET, we also discuss group maintenance in this paper. Finally, we conducted the security and performance analysis to compare the proposed scheme with Tseng et al.’s [Tseng, Y.-M., Yang, C.-C., Liao, D.-R., 2007. A secure group communication protocol for ad hoc wireless networks. In: Advances in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks and Mobile Computing. Book Series Signal and Communication Technology. Springer] and Steiner et al.’s [Steiner, M., Tsudik, G., Waidner, M., 1998. CLIQUES: a new approach to group key agreement. In: Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing System. Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 380–387] schemes.