A Key Management Scheme for Ad Hoc Networks

With initial trust in the system model, a new identity-based distributed key management scheme is proposed. Verifiable secret sharing technology and blind short signatures are applied into this scheme. The scheme is composed of system initialization, update of a node's private key, share refreshing of system private key, discover of malicious node and key revocation. The model with initial trust makes the scheme more secure. The overhead of storage, communication and computation are reduced since the identity-based public key system is used. The verifiable secret share technology effectively prevents the node from behaving dishonestly. The update scheme of a node's private key provides mutual authentication. The blind short signature ensures the share of private key can be transmitted in the unsecured channel. The key revocation is simple and convenient since the valid time is added to the key. The analysis shows that the proposed scheme not only provides greater security, but also improves the efficiency than previous scheme for ad hoc networks.