Integrated Random Seed and Data-dependent Dynamic Key Generation for Security in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents random seed and data dependent dynamic key generation algorithm for secure end-to-end transport of data in a clustered Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET). Security is a major concern in MANETs since they are designed using wireless transport with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Technologies (COTS) which facilitate many users to have similar radios and can cause security threats in terms of presence of malicious radios which can be used to pick the data and reroute the data to users with no allowability, thus compromising the data. In this paper, the key in each packet varies and it is generated partially with a seed, a portion of the data from a previous packet, which changes in each packet. When malicious radio pick up the packet, they will not be able to decode the data in the packet. The security algorithm using this principle has been applied to a MANET to support secure data transmission end-to-end. MANET is considered as a group of small clusters and every cluster will have a Cluster Head (CH) and a group of assigned nodes. End-to-end transport of data implies that the data is transported over multiple clusters between a source and a destination. Both intra-cluster and inter-cluster communications take place when packets are transmitted end-to-end. When a radio in a cluster sends data, it will be received by the local CH which forwards the data across multiple CHs before the data reaches the destination radio. Radios can move freely within and outside the cluster. The distributed network management ensures that these radios are assigned to appropriate CHs as they move from one cluster to another cluster. The focus of this paper is to provide a secure method to transport data from the source radio to a destination radio. The intra-cluster communication uses an access protocol to send data from a radio to the CH. The receiving data from other clusters are broadcasted to the destination radio. When data is transmitted across different clusters, the CHs of different clusters are used. The overall communications in the network will be secure using the proposed security algorithm. The overall secure network is designed and simulated. The results will be presented in terms of overall throughput and packet delay. Based on the results, this paper shows that the proposed data dependent security scheme offers a more robust performance while keeping higher throughput compared to other techniques presented in the research literature.