SMOCK: A Scalable Method of Cryptographic Key Management for Mission-Critical Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Mission-critical networks show great potential in emergency response and/or recovery, health care, critical infrastructure monitoring, etc. Such mission-critical applications demand that security service be ldquoanywhere,rdquo ldquoanytime,rdquo and ldquoanyhow.rdquo However, it is challenging to de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on information forensics and security 2009-03, Vol.4 (1), p.140-150
Main Authors: Wenbo He, Ying Huang, Sathyam, R., Nahrstedt, K., Lee, W.C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ad hoc networks
Authentication
Availability
Combinatorial analysis
Combinatorial key management
Communication system security
Computer information security
Cryptography
Data security
Demand
Disaster management
Forensic engineering
Management
Medical services
Mission critical systems
Monitoring
Network security
Networks
Public Key Infrastructure
security in ubiquitous computing
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Summary:Mission-critical networks show great potential in emergency response and/or recovery, health care, critical infrastructure monitoring, etc. Such mission-critical applications demand that security service be ldquoanywhere,rdquo ldquoanytime,rdquo and ldquoanyhow.rdquo However, it is challenging to design a key management scheme in current mission-critical networks to fulfill the required attributes of secure communications, such as data integrity, authentication, confidentiality, nonrepudiation, and service availability. In this paper, we present a self-contained public key-management scheme, a scalable method of cryptographic key management (SMOCK), which achieves almost zero communication overhead for authentication, and offers high service availability. In our scheme, a small number of cryptographic keys are stored offline at individual nodes before they are deployed in the network. To provide good scalability in terms of the number of nodes and storage space, we utilize a combinatorial design of public-private key pairs, which means nodes combine more than one key pair to encrypt and decrypt messages. We also show that SMOCK provides controllable resilience when malicious nodes compromise a limited number of nodes before key revocation and renewal.
ISSN:1556-6013
1556-6021
DOI:10.1109/TIFS.2008.2009601