Secure Pairwise Key Establishments for Flying Ad hoc Networks

This paper proposes a pairwise key establishment scheme which is immune to compromise of nodes in flying ad hoc networks. At network boot-up time, each node establishes initial keys with at most three-hop distant nodes. Then, any two nodes establishing a pairwise key get a partial key from nodes on the route between them, and generate a pairwise key by combining the partial keys. During the obtainment of partial keys, the nodes on the route employ the initial keys to send their partial key to both nodes securely. If a node one the route has no initial key for its partial key transmission, it can obtain such a key from its already known neighbors due to the small-world phenomenon.