A Multihop Key Agreement Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc NetworksBased on Channel Characteristics

Abstract

A number of key agreement schemes based on wireless channel characteristics have been proposed recently. However, previous key agreement schemes require that two nodes which need to agree on a key are within the communication range of each other. Hence, they are not suitable for multihop wireless networks, in which nodes do not always have direct connections with each other. In this paper, we first propose a basic multihop key agreement scheme for wireless ad hoc networks. The proposed basic scheme is resistant to external eavesdroppers. Nevertheless, this basic scheme is not secure when there exist internal eavesdroppers or Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) adversaries. In order to cope with these adversaries, we propose an improved multihop key agreement scheme. We show that the improved scheme is secure against internal eavesdroppers and MITM adversaries in a single path. Both performance analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the improved scheme is efficient. Consequently, the improved key agreement scheme is suitable for multihop wireless ad hoc networks.

Applications of Economic and Pricing Models for Wireless Network Security: A Survey

“…Economic and pricing models as distributed solutions can maximize the secrecy capacity without requiring the perfect knowledge of all channel information. • Internal eavesdropper: An internal eavesdropper is an intermediate node in a path which is selected for relaying or forwarding the information [52]. It may be an untrusted relay node which tries to eavesdrop the information coming from the source.…”

“…Due to the broadcast nature of the wireless transmission, anyone within the communication range can intercept the source's information. An unauthorized receiver is called an eavesdropper [52]. Power allocation is the major approach used to improve secrecy capacity in that a friendly jammer allocates the Friendly Jamming (FJ) power to source-destination links.…”

“…• External eavesdropper: An external eavesdropper is an unauthorized receiver which is not an intermediate node in any path which is selected for relaying or forwarding the information [52]. Centralized schemes in which the objective is to optimize the secrecy capacity can be applied.…”

A Cross-Layer Key Establishment Scheme in Wireless Mesh Networks

“…Deviation of phase (or phase offset) was used to extract secret bits in [12][13][14][15]. To increase the key bit generation rate, Zeng et al exploited multiple-antenna diversity in [12] to generate secret keys for wireless nodes and implemented it on off-the-shelf 802.11n multiple-antenna devices.…”

“…A cooperative key generation protocol was proposed in [14] to facilitate high rate key generation in narrowband fading channels with the aid of relay node(s). Zhuo et al [15] presented a multihop key establishment scheme based on the assumption that the network is biconnected, and the security of [15] is guaranteed against adversaries in a single path.…”