Secure and Efficient Key Management Protocol for Emergency Communications

Mission-critical networks must continue to operate during any type of disaster, including hurricanes, earthquakes or fires. Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) is the promising alternatives in such type of situations. To build a secure communication system, usually the first attempt is to employ cryptographic keys. The effective designs on fast pairwise key generation and rekeying for mesh routers are critical for emergency response and are essential to protect unicast traffic. In this paper, we present a security-enhanced pairwise key generation and rekeying protocol, EH (Enhanced 4-way Handshake), which eliminates the DoS attack problem of 4-way handshake in 802.11s. The performance and security analysis show that EH is efficient and resilient to various types of attacks.