Robust self-keying mobile ad hoc networks

Pairwise key establishment in mobile ad hoc networks allows any pair of nodes to agree upon a shared key. This is an important security service needed to secure routing protocols, and in general to facilitate secure communication among the nodes of the network.We present two self-keying mechanisms for pairwise key establishment in mobile ad hoc networks which do not require any centralized support. The mechanisms are built using the well-known technique of threshold secret sharing, and are robust and secure against a collusion of up to a certain number of nodes. We evaluate and compare the performance of both the mechanisms in terms of the node admission and pairwise key establishment.